Free 4:3 storyboard template
A printable 4:3 storyboard template. Six frames a page at the classic boarding ratio, for animation pipelines, archive and period looks, and anything delivering squarer than widescreen.
What’s inside
The squarer boarding frame at true ratio, numbered 1 to 6 and ruled underneath.
The height a widescreen box crops off, which is where a lot of 4:3 staging lives.
Landscape A4 with the margins inside the page, clear enough to punch. It prints on US Letter scaled to fit.
What 4:3 means
Four units wide to three tall, written as a decimal as 1.33:1. The shape of television before widescreen, and it survived because a lot of boarding and animation still works in it.
Where 4:3 still turns up
Plenty of studios board in it and deliver wide. A taller frame gives more room for vertical staging and headroom than 16:9.
A piece cut against older footage, or one that wants to feel like a broadcast from before widescreen. Boarding at the delivered shape keeps the pastiche consistent.
The pillarbox question
A 4:3 picture inside a 16:9 player leaves black bars down both sides. That is worth settling before the shoot, because on some jobs it is the intention and on others it is a mistake.
- On a period or archive piece the bars are part of the language and nobody watching thinks the file is broken. If 4:3 is the intended format, check how each placement handles it. Some players pillarbox the frame and some platforms may crop or fill it.
- If the piece has to work as both, shoot 16:9 and protect a 4:3 centre, with the protected area ruled on the board.
Filling it in
Shot, action, sound and timing, written across the two ruled lines under each box, on a short sequence invented for this page.
An empty hall, a dog waiting by a front door. A key turns in the lock, the door opens, and the dog gets up.
- Shot
- Wide, low. Locked off at dog height.
- Action
- The dog lies in the hall facing the door. Nothing in frame moves.
- Sound
- House tone. A clock, off.
- Timing
- 3 sec
- Shot
- Close on the lock. 50mm.
- Action
- The key turns from outside. The handle drops.
- Sound
- Key, lock, handle. No music.
- Timing
- 2 sec
- Shot
- Same wide as frame 1. Held.
- Action
- Light spreads across the floor. The dog gets up and its tail starts.
- Sound
- Door, footsteps. Music in.
- Timing
- 3 sec
- Repeating frame 1 as frame 3 is the whole joke of the sequence: write same as 1 rather than drawing it twice.
- In animation one beat often needs more than one frame, because the anticipation and the action are separate drawings.
The sheet, and printing it
Six frames, three across and two down, numbered, with Project, Scene, Date and Page ruled across the top. A 4:3 box is taller than a widescreen one at the same width, so the two rows sit closer together than they do on the 16:9 sheet. Every sheet here rules the same two lines under a box; it is the blank paper around them that changes.
It is A4, 210 by 297mm, with the margins inside the page rather than set on the printer, and no crop marks anywhere. US Letter works too: Fit to page scales the whole sheet to about 94 percent, so the boxes come out at true 4:3.
Build your storyboard in Storybrdr
The same sheet on a screen. Boards share by link, export as a PDF, and open on a phone on the day.
Boards are built from images and sketches dropped onto the frames, and the shot numbers reorder themselves when a shot moves. 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.