Free 9:16 vertical storyboard template
A printable vertical storyboard template for Reels, TikTok and Stories. Six true 9:16 frames across a landscape page, laid out as a filmstrip so a whole cutdown reads in one look.
What’s inside
Vertical boxes at the shape the piece is delivered in, so you compose for a phone from the first sketch.
Six frames run left to right so the sequence can be read across one page.
Landscape A4 with the margins inside the page, clear enough to punch. It prints on US Letter scaled to fit.
What 9:16 means
Nine units wide to sixteen tall: 16:9 stood on its end, and the shape of a phone held upright.
The part of the frame anyone actually sees
A vertical piece plays full screen with the platform's own interface over the top of it, and that interface is not in the same place twice.
Captions, the account name, the description and a row of buttons sit in the lower picture. Anything that has to be read belongs above them.
A progress bar and a back arrow across the top; like, comment, share and sound stacked down the right. Keep the subject clear of that edge.
The sheet gives you the true 9:16 box and nothing else, because where the interface lands depends on the placement and moves between updates. Rule it on frame one and let the strip inherit it.
The master and the cutdowns
Where a campaign has a wide film as well, which of the two is the master is worth deciding on paper, before a crop decides it on the day.
- A 9:16 crop out of a 16:9 frame keeps a little under a third of the width, so whatever the composition depended on at the sides has gone.
- If the vertical cut is the version most people will see, build the day around that shape and treat the wide film as the reframe. Either way, board the two rather than writing crop for vertical on one of them.
Why a vertical template prints on a landscape page
Six tall frames across a landscape page read left to right like a filmstrip, which is how somebody thumbs through a cutdown, and a thirty-second vertical piece often is six shots. Three enormous boxes on a portrait sheet would look more like the finished piece and tell you far less about the edit.
Filling it in
Shot, action, sound and timing, written small across the two ruled lines under each box.
A hand sets a takeaway cup down on a table by a window. A phone buzzes beside it. Somebody leans in from the top of frame to read the screen.
- Shot
- Close, vertical. Locked off at table height.
- Action
- The cup lands. Steam catches the window light. Head space at the top.
- Sound
- Cup on wood. Street noise, quiet, no music yet.
- Timing
- 2 sec
- Shot
- Same frame, cut in tighter. Handheld, small drift.
- Action
- The phone lights the table face up beside the cup and buzzes twice.
- Sound
- Two buzzes. Street noise drops away.
- Timing
- 2 sec
- Shot
- Mid, vertical. Slow push in.
- Action
- They lean in from the top of frame and read it. Hold on the reaction.
- Sound
- Track starts on the lean. No dialogue.
- Timing
- 3 sec
- Head position is the note that gets used, because the bottom of the frame is spoken for. Timings run short, and the cut is most of the piece.
Paper and printing
A4, 210 by 297mm, margins inside the page rather than set on the printer, no crop marks. US Letter needs Fit to page, which prints it at about 94 percent. The long top edge is the one to punch, not the short left one: the strip still reads left to right in the binder and the holes stay clear of frame one.
Build your storyboard in Storybrdr
The same filmstrip on a screen. Boards share by link, export as a PDF, and open on a phone on the day.
A wide board can be duplicated and reframed to 9:16 with the crop set on each frame. Export at 4, 6 or 10 vertical 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.