Storyboards

What is a storyboard?

Once a concept or script is written for a film or animation, the next step is to make a storyboard. A storyboard visually tells the story of an animation panel by panel, kind of a comic book.
Your storyboard should convey some of the following information:
What characters are in the frame, and how are they moving?
What are the characters saying to each other, if anything?
How much time has passed between the last frame of the storyboard and the current one?
Where the "camera" is in the scene? Close or far away? Is the camera moving?
Why make a storyboard?
Creating a storyboard will help you plan your animation out shot by shot. You can make changes to your storyboard before you start animating, instead of changing your mind later. 
You will also be able to talk about your animation and show your storyboard to other people to get feedback on your ideas.
How do I make a storyboard?
Most commonly, storyboards are drawn in pen or pencil. If you don't like to draw you can also take photos, cut out pictures from magazines, or use a computer to make your storyboards. 
Keep in mind that your drawings don't have to be fancy! In fact, you want to spend just a few minutes drawing each frame. Use basic shapes, stick figures, and simple backgrounds. If you draw your storyboard frames on index cards, you can rearrange them to move parts of the story around.
Usage
Film
A film storyboard is essentially a large comic of the film or some section of the film produced beforehand to help film directors, cinematographers and television commercial advertising clients visualize the scenes and find potential problems before they occur. Often storyboards include arrows or instructions that indicate movement.
In creating a motion picture with any degree of fidelity to a script, a storyboard provides a visual layout of events as they are to be seen through the camera lens. 
Theater
A common misconception is that storyboards are not used in theater. They are frequently special tools that directors and playwrights use to understand the layout of the scene. 
Animatics
In animation and special effects work, the storyboarding stage may be followed by simplified mock-ups called "animatics" to give a better idea of how the scene will look and feel with motion and timing. At its simplest, an animatic is a series of still images edited together and displayed in sequence. More commonly, a rough dialogue and/or rough sound track is added to the sequence of still images (usually taken from a storyboard) to test whether the sound and images are working effectively together.
Comic books
Some writers have used storyboard type drawings for their scripting of comic books, often indicating staging of figures, backgrounds and balloon placement with instructions to the artist as needed often scribbled in the margins and the dialogue/captions indicated.