Free 16:9 storyboard template
A free printable 16:9 storyboard template with six numbered widescreen frames per page and ruled space underneath for shot information, action and timing.
What’s inside
Widescreen boxes at true broadcast ratio, numbered 1 to 6 so everybody turns to the same picture.
A ruled band under each box for shot size, camera movement and duration.
Landscape A4 with the margins inside the page, clear enough to punch. It prints on US Letter scaled to fit.
What 16:9 means
Sixteen units wide to nine tall, written as a decimal as 1.78:1. You will also see it written as 16x9. It is the same aspect ratio. It is the standard shape for television and landscape video, and remains one of the most common delivery ratios for commercial and online film.
- A camera recording UHD and a phone playing a 720p file show the same rectangle. Pixel count changes how far you can crop in later, not what you compose now.
When 16:9 is the right board
Television delivery, YouTube, a film on a client's site. If the piece gets a player of its own rather than a slot in a feed, it is going out at 16:9.
Anything watched on a laptop. Two people frame comfortably in it, and the width holds a useful piece of the room behind them.
Where the job needs wide, vertical and square deliverables, decide the master and cutdowns before the shoot. If 16:9 is the master, board the other versions separately rather than assuming every wide composition will crop.
A piece that will only ever be seen inside a phone feed. Composing wide and cropping later leaves you with a frame nobody sees.
How the sheet works
One page, six frames, three across and two down.
The frames print numbered 1 to 6, so when somebody says frame four everybody turns to the same picture. The numbers start again on each sheet, which is what the page field is for.
Two ruled lines under every box, unlabelled on purpose. What needs writing down changes from job to job, and a printed label saying Sound is wasted on a job with no sound design in it.
Project, Scene, Date and Page, ruled to write on. Page is blank because the file has no idea how many sheets you are about to print.
Filling it in
Four things go across the two ruled lines under each box: the shot, the action, the sound and the timing. Here they are on a sequence invented for this page.
A kitchen, early morning. A kettle comes to the boil, a phone starts ringing on the worktop, and someone crosses the room to answer it.
- Shot
- Close on the kettle. 50mm, locked off.
- Action
- Steam builds against the window. The kettle clicks off.
- Sound
- Kettle rumble, rising, then the click. No dialogue.
- Timing
- 3 sec
- Shot
- Wide, whole kitchen. Slow push in towards the worktop.
- Action
- The phone lights up and rings. Nothing else in the room moves.
- Sound
- Ringtone, close. Kettle settling underneath it.
- Timing
- 4 sec
- Shot
- Mid, over the shoulder. Handheld.
- Action
- A hand comes into frame and lifts the phone. Hold on the empty worktop.
- Sound
- Ringtone stops mid-ring. Room tone.
- Timing
- 2 sec
- That fits in two lines of small handwriting, which is what the sheet gives you. If a frame needs more than it, it is often two shots, and splitting it costs a box and saves an argument.
How many pages your film needs
Six frames to a page, so the arithmetic is easy once you have picked an average shot length. A dialogue scene runs far longer per shot than a title sequence cut to a track, so treat these as a starting point.
- One frame per shot is the assumption underneath it, and it breaks the moment a shot moves: board a camera move at the start and again at the end and it costs two boxes.
Printing it
The file is A4, 210 by 297mm, with the margins inside the page rather than set on the printer. On US Letter choose Fit to page and it comes out at about 94 percent, everything scaling together, so the boxes stay at true 16:9 and nothing is cropped.
About 13mm clear at the sides and 12mm top and bottom, no crop marks, nothing meant to be trimmed. A two-hole punch sets its holes roughly 12mm in from the edge, so punch the long top edge: a board in a binder that opens upwards is easier to draw on anyway.
When another shape suits the job better
All four have a sheet of their own here. Where a campaign needs more than one shape, board each rather than cropping the wide version and hoping.
Build your storyboard in Storybrdr
The same layout on a screen, with the approved frame still attached to the shot when it gets to the floor. Boards share by link, export as a PDF, and open on a phone on the day.
Images and sketches go on by dragging them onto a frame, a pasted scene can be broken into shots, and the shot list derives from the board rather than being typed again. Export at 4, 6 or 9 widescreen frames to a sheet.
All five ratios live in the app, so where the wide film is the master the vertical and square cutdowns can be duplicates of this board with the crop set frame by frame, rather than two more boards drawn from memory.
The exported PDF is printed by the same engine that printed the blank sheet at the top of this page, which is why the two are the same document.
More on what that looks like: the features tour.
How it compares with other storyboard software is covered in the full comparison.