A storyboard is a row of simple drawings, like a comic strip, made before a film is shot. Each drawing shows one shot: what the camera sees, who is standing where, what happens next. Under each picture there are usually a few words about the sound, or the movement, or how long the shot lasts. The drawings are often rough — stick figures are completely normal — because the point is not to be beautiful. The point is that everyone on the team can see the whole film in ten minutes and argue about it before anyone spends money.

It is also a verb: to storyboard something. "We storyboarded the whole ad on Friday." And you will hear it far outside film now. People storyboard adverts, animations, game scenes, YouTube videos, teaching materials, even app screens and business presentations — anywhere you want to plan the order of things visually before building them. That wider use is completely normal in offices and is not slang.

One useful thing about it: it is a working word, not a fancy one. Nobody feels clever saying it. If you are in a meeting and someone says "let's storyboard it first", they are saying: stop arguing in words, draw the boxes, then we will see where the problem is.