Story Board

The story boarding stage is essential in the production of any animation, be it feature length or a minute long, it provides copious amounts of information regarding the key shots, camera angles, speech, movement etc ... everything that will be required by the animators, scene designers and anyone else working on the project. The storyboard are often then put together to produce a small animation of their own known as an animatik. The storyboarding process, should it be carried out properly can save a large amount of time, for it can drastically shorten the editing stage, knowing what you want and need first time round can save vast amounts of effort, so it's important to get this stage right! It can also be shown to any clients to ensure that you are on the same page and they are going to get the finished outcome that they deserve. Alfred Hitchcock was quoted having said that 'one of the biggest problems that we have in our business is the inability of people to visualize', naturally when creating storyboards for his films (although not animated, the principle still applies) he would go into tremendous amounts of detail, as you can see below in this small section of story board from his hit horror movie Psycho.
By following this link you'll see an animatic/storyboard for a short animated film called 'The lady and the reaper', it gives a good idea of timing, but more importantly, camera angles, characters positioning etc... An example of a really good storyboard artist is Josh Sheppard who has worked on a number of films including War horse and Lincoln. His site can be found below

http://www.thestoryboardartist.com/Site/Home.html