How Do You Effectively Communicate Your Vision to Your Team?
Unlock the full potential of your vision with strategies that are battle-tested by industry leaders. This article distills expert insights into actionable steps, covering effective storyboarding, detailed animatics, and the use of comprehensive mood boards. Learn to communicate your ideas clearly and inspire your team to bring them to life.
- Storyboard Every Moment
- Create Detailed Animatics
- Use Comprehensive Mood Boards
Storyboard Every Moment
Storyboard everything. If every moment of the project has a clear visual plan, there's less margin for error because there's clarity around the exact vision you're trying to capture. It also helps to quell my personal anxieties about upcoming projects, ensuring I've done ample time preparing in pre-production. Recently I've been using Midjourney to create storyboards. With specific prompts, you can create relatively accurate character models, which can then be recurringly implemented into specific scenarios. That being said, the storyboard isn't a bible. If an unplanned moment arises that would benefit the story being told, capture it.
Create Detailed Animatics
One technique we rely on to ensure our vision is effectively communicated and executed by the team is creating animatics. These are rough edits that consist of hand-drawn storyboards, AI-generated voiceovers, stock footage, and a carefully chosen music track. Together, it provides a clear representation of the project's pace, tone, and timing.
Animatics act as a visual and auditory blueprint for the entire production. For example, the AI voiceover and music track help establish mood and energy, while the storyboards and stock footage clarify framing, transitions, and movement. This level of detail ensures every team member, from directors to editors to sound designers, has a unified understanding of what we're aiming to achieve.
This method not only reduces misunderstandings but also allows room for early feedback and adjustments before production begins, saving time and resources later. Animatics are invaluable in aligning the creative team's efforts with the project's vision, ensuring the final output matches, or exceeds, what we envisioned.
Use Comprehensive Mood Boards
Making detailed mood boards and spending a committed time to finalize it, is a method that I think has been helpful to clearly communicate my vision to the team and help them understand it better, so they can execute it better. This board features reference images, color palettes, and examples of cinematography or framing that embody the tone and style I imagine for the project. By visually demonstrating my concepts, I can offer my team a solid reference that aligns everyone's understanding and expectations. We keep adding to the board with whatever new ideas we come across, so everyone is unified and works in harmony.
