Backstory – What is a Storyboard?

Similar to graphic novels or comic books, a storyboard is a set of sequential sketches that tells a story in individual frames while also illustrating the passage of time. The linear direction of the story cells is helpful for layout and visualizing shoot sequences when making films.

This is how my own career in documentary film has unfolded – frame by frame, over a span of nearly three decades. I was not the artist of my own storyboard. I did not do the planning nor lay out the scenes and I was only able to see it once the frames were behind me. And yet the linear sequence of film projects that I found myself involved with over the years drove my own narrative forward in a way that seemed almost to have an intelligence of its own.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my storyboard began with just twenty dollars.

I was in my early thirties and climbing through the emotional fallout of losing a job I loved. My husband, Steve, worked in construction. Eventually he quit working for others to start his own plumbing business, the third generation in his family to work in that trade. We had a baby. When our little girl was two and a half, Steve had a banner month, which we optimistically thought was a sure sign of good things to come. On the strength of that, we decided to have a second child. We bought a small wreck of a house from an elderly, and quite often inebriated, airport architect with half a dozen cats, which we renovated ourselves with the help of friends.

But the financial high didn’t last and by the time our son was born the following spring, we could no longer afford daycare, nor our house due to the costs of running Steve’s business. We lost everything.

Steve had been orphaned at an early age and I was the youngest child of parents who prized an independent spirit in their offspring, so there was nowhere for us to turn for help. We were completely on our own financially.

After Leif was born, I used my background in design to work part time for an architecture firm, while also freelancing from home for artists, illustrators, and musicians, and trying – at the encouragement of another author – to get a children’s book I’d written and illustrated, published. Most often I was hired to find gigs or fundraise for them because someone once told me artists would rather chew off their right arm than ask people for money.

My contractor husband was a compassionate soul with a generous spirit who sometimes had a difficult time asking customers to actually pay him for his work. And I had more clients for whom I worked on commission than on salary. Together, we earned just enough to barely get by.

The career in documentary film and television that sprang to life from those ashes was not planned. I didn’t have a degree in film, nor any expertise. There was nothing in my life up to that moment to hint I might even be headed in that direction. Thinking back, if we hadn’t been so broke, however, it might not have happened at all.

But broke we were.

As luck and strange circumstance would have it, the career I would never have imagined for myself began with Mikhail Baryshnikov, a set of bedsheets Sophia Loren had once slept in, and a deserted island.

Pondering these random items, like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles, it seems so unlikely they would launch a decades-long career. But somehow, I found a way to put them together into a paying gig that sustained me and my children. Had any one of them been missing, I likely would not have wandered into this astonishing career at all.

Over the coming years, working with documentary films would upend my life, then upend it a second time.

But working with films would also put my life back together again and again, and in ways I could never have imagined or foreseen. This was a storyboard created on the fly, a storyboard that revealed itself just one frame at a time as the future sketched itself out for me.

I’ve now worked in one capacity or another on more than one hundred films, a number that never fails to astonish me. I have traveled via documentary films to London, Istanbul, Berlin, various parts of Italy as well as many cities across the U.S.

I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of visionary storytellers, many of whom are now friends. I’ve had my eyes opened, my mind expanded, and my heart filled many times over.

And it all began with just twenty dollars….

What to read next: Story Frame 1 – The Night Barysknikov Opened the Door to Another World