Free 2.39:1 anamorphic storyboard template
A printable 2.39:1 storyboard template at true scope ratio. Six letterbox frames a page with ruled space underneath, so what goes on paper is the shape that gets delivered.
What’s inside
Sketched freehand, a scope frame tends to come out squarer than it is. A box already at the right proportion takes that out of the drawing.
Room for the shot, the movement, and where in that long box the subject sits.
Landscape A4 with the margins inside the page, clear enough to punch. It prints on US Letter scaled to fit.
What 2.39:1 means
2.39:1 is a common scope delivery ratio, often associated with anamorphic cinematography but not dependent on it: a fraction under two and a half times wider than it is tall.
Letterboxing, and what it costs
Very little scope work is delivered as a 2.39:1 file. Most of it arrives inside a 16:9 container with black bars top and bottom, which is worth knowing before the frame gets composed.
- In a 1920 by 1080 file the picture is 1920 by 804 and the bars take the remaining 276 lines, so a quarter of the delivered height is black. On a laptop that reads as cinema; in a phone feed the player is already a letterbox inside a scrolling column, and the picture ends up a thin strip.
- Scope is the hardest shape to get a cutdown out of. If the piece also runs vertical or square, board that on its own sheet.
Composing for the width
In a box this long, where the subject sits does most of the work, and that is what the board records.
- Write down the position: left third, right edge, dead centre. That is the note somebody operating a camera can act on.
- Scope rewards holding a shot and letting people move inside it, so the same camera turns up on several frames. Write held, no reframe rather than drawing it three times. And a run of close-ups leaves the sides doing nothing, which the board will show you before the shoot does.
How this sheet differs from the others
Six frames, three across and two down on A4 landscape, the same grid as the other widescreen sheets. What changes is the height of the box: a 2.39:1 frame printed three to a row is not much deeper than a couple of lines of handwriting, and there is more blank paper between the two rows than on any other sheet here. The two ruled lines themselves are the same two that every sheet here carries.
The file is A4, 210 by 297mm, margins inside the page, no crop marks. For US Letter, Fit to page, which lands at about 94 percent with the whole sheet scaling as one thing, so the boxes stay at true 2.39:1.
Filling it in
Shot, action, sound and timing on the two ruled lines, on a short sequence invented for this page.
A wide, near-empty room at dusk. A figure comes in from the left, crosses the room, and sits at the far end of a long table.
- Shot
- Extreme wide, locked off. Room fills the frame edge to edge.
- Action
- Empty room. Last light through a window at the right of frame.
- Sound
- Room tone. Traffic, distant.
- Timing
- 4 sec
- Shot
- Same wide. Held, no reframe.
- Action
- The figure enters at the left edge and crosses right, small in the frame.
- Sound
- Footsteps on boards. No music.
- Timing
- 5 sec
- Shot
- Mid, cut in. Slight low angle, left third.
- Action
- They sit at the far end of the table and look back the way they came.
- Sound
- Chair. Music in, low.
- Timing
- 3 sec
- Two of those three frames are the same camera, and that is the decision the sheet is recording.
Build your storyboard in Storybrdr
The same letterbox layout on a screen. Boards share by link, export as a PDF, and open on a phone on the day.
A frame holds a reference still with a sketch over the top of it, which suits a shape that is mostly about where things sit. Export at 4, 6 or 9 frames a page.
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.