Opinion · Pre-production

What every director gets wrong about the first storyboard pass

I want to talk about a meeting I had on a Tuesday last spring. A senior commercials director I have worked with for years sent me a 90-second script for a luxury automotive spot. He is good. The agency was good. The client was Tier One. The brief came in at 4pm on a Tuesday, the agency presentation was Friday morning, and the director’s note in the email was three words: quick rough pass.

I did what I was asked. I sent 22 thumbnails over the course of Wednesday and Thursday. They went into the agency deck on Friday. The agency client loved them. The end-client client did not. Not because the boards were wrong, exactly. Because the boards were a different film from the one the director had in his head — and nobody had clocked that until the meeting in Soho where it could no longer be quietly fixed. The director and I spent the following weekend redoing 14 of the 22 frames so that the Monday re-presentation matched what he had actually been imagining. Two production days. Two of the client’s working days. A re-bid on the post schedule. All of it preventable.

The cost of that misalignment was not the frames. The cost was the trust. Clients do not see how the sausage is made. They see two presentations in five days with materially different boards, and they wonder whether the agency knows what it is doing.

The misalignment most first passes share

[SEB POV: confirm or rewrite — draft says: the failure is almost never the boarder drawing badly, and almost never the director communicating badly. It is that both people assume the first pass is a draft, when it is the cheapest version of the conversation everyone is about to have with the agency, the client, and themselves.]

After ten years boarding for Premier League Productions, Bentley, Coca-Cola, Nike, Honda, the BBC, and the rest, I can tell you the single most common failure on the first pass is not a craft failure. It is a definition failure. The director thinks they are commissioning a sketch. The boarder thinks they are commissioning a film. The agency thinks they are commissioning a deck slide. The client thinks they are commissioning a promise. All four are looking at the same 22 frames and reading four different documents.

A good first pass solves this before a single frame is drawn. A bad first pass — even a beautifully drawn one — survives the meeting, kills the weekend, and quietly erodes the relationship between the people who need to trust each other most.

Below are the five things I see directors get wrong most often. None of them are about taste. All of them are about pre-production discipline. All of them are fixable in a ten-minute call.

1. Treating the first pass as a draft instead of a thinking tool

The first pass is not a draft. It is the cheapest version of the film you are about to make. Treat it as the cheapest version of the film, not as a rough sketch that gets polished later.

[SEB POV: confirm — draft says: I would rather a director hand me a paragraph of what they actually want the audience to feel in shot four than three reference images of other ads they liked. References tell me what the agency bought. The paragraph tells me what you are trying to make.]

When the first pass is treated as a thinking tool, the entire production benefits. The director gets to look at the structure of their own film before committing the agency or the client to it. The agency gets to test whether the script the client signed off actually translates to picture. The boarder gets to flag the moments where the script is hiding a problem — a transition that does not work, a beat that needs a setup, a line of VO that has nowhere to land visually.

When the first pass is treated as a draft, none of that happens. The director nods. The agency nods. The client signs off. Then, in the edit suite four weeks later, somebody quietly says: the second act does not work, does it.

2. Skipping the brief-alignment call

Ten minutes. Not thirty. Not a Zoom with five people. Ten minutes on the phone, director to boarder, before the first thumbnail.

What we cover on that call, every time:

• What is the film actually about. Not the script — the film. What does the audience leave with.
• Which beats matter. There are usually three. Tell me which three.
• What is the visual mechanic. Slow push, locked-off, handheld, oner, montage. One sentence.
• What does the agency think it bought. Sometimes this is different from what the director thinks they are making. Better to know now.
• What is the lock date. We will come back to this one.

The directors I do my best work with — [SEB POV: confirm or replace with named directors — draft says: people like the senior commercials directors at Riff Raff, Stink, Pulse, Smuggler — the ones who came up through music videos and have done this 200 times] — always make the ten-minute call. The directors who skip it tend to be the directors who later complain that the boards are not what they asked for.

The agency-side producers reading this should note: you can be the person who insists on the call. The director will not always think to. The boarder might be too polite to push. The producer who books the ten minutes saves the production ten hours. That is the trade.

3. Asking for “rough” when you mean “fast”

This is the single most expensive translation error in our industry, and I am going to die on this hill.

Rough is a fidelity. It means low detail, expressive line, no rendering, no lighting, no environment. A rough board is six or seven minutes per frame, sometimes faster.

Fast is a turnaround. It means I am working tonight, not next week. A fast board can be fully tonal, fully composed, fully lit — it just has to land in your inbox by tomorrow morning.

When a director writes quick rough pass in an email, they almost always mean fast. They want it tomorrow. They are not actually asking for ugly frames; they are asking for an urgent timeline. But because they have used the word rough, the boarder delivers loose thumbnails — and then the agency looks at the loose thumbnails and says: can we have something more presentable for the client meeting on Friday.

So the boarder, having done the fast version, now does the proper version, and now there are two passes where there should have been one, and the production budget has absorbed a day of work that should never have existed.

[SEB POV: confirm — draft says: tell me the turnaround in hours and the fidelity in adjectives. “I need 18 frames by tomorrow 5pm, tonal, composed for the agency deck.” That sentence saves everyone a day.]

4. Reviewing alone instead of with the agency in the room

This one is harder, because it cuts against how a lot of directors prefer to work. Directors are visual people. They want to sit with the boards on their own, absorb them, form an opinion, then come back with notes.

The problem is that the agency is not in the room when the opinion forms. So when the notes come back, they read like a unilateral creative judgement, and the agency producer has to spend their evening untangling which of the notes are director taste, which are unspoken client risk, and which are misreadings of the script the agency had to fight for.

A 20-minute review call with the director, the agency CD, and the boarder on the line — all of us looking at the same PDF — collapses two days of email-tennis into one conversation. The notes come out cleaner. The boarder leaves the call knowing exactly what the next pass needs. The agency leaves the call having reconciled the director’s taste with the client’s risk profile. Everyone is on the same page, on the same call, in the same hour.

The directors who insist on reviewing alone are usually the directors who were burned at some point by an agency talking over them. I understand it. I have seen it happen. The fix is not to exclude the agency from the review. The fix is to chair the review yourself.

5. Not telling the boarder what the lock date is

This is the one almost nobody gets right.

Production is asking the director to commit. Pre-production lock is a real date with a real cost behind it. The director knows it. The producer knows it. The agency knows it.

Often, the boarder does not.

[SEB POV: confirm or rewrite — draft says: I cannot pace the work properly if I do not know when the boards have to be locked. If lock is Friday and I am told on Monday, I pace differently than if lock is two Fridays from now. I will not rush a frame that does not need to be rushed. I will not slow-walk a frame that needs to be on a director’s desk by 9am tomorrow. But I can only do that if you tell me when the decision has to be made.]

The fix is one line in the brief email: We need to lock boards by Friday 6 June for the pre-pro on Monday 9 June. That is it. Now the boarder is pacing toward the same date as the producer. Now the boarder is offering to do the harder frames first because they know the easier ones can be finished in the back half of the week. Now the boarder is not asking for a fourth round of notes on a Wednesday when there is no time for a fourth round.

A boarder who knows the lock date will quietly protect the production. A boarder who does not is operating in the dark.

What good directors do differently

I have worked with senior directors who skip none of the above. They are the directors whose productions I will always make room for, no matter how busy the diary is. A few patterns I see:

[SEB POV: confirm or replace with named-director examples — draft says these are the patterns, not a list of names. Seb may want to name two or three directors publicly here if comfortable.]

They open with the film, not the script. The first thing they tell me is what they want the audience to feel at the end. Not the storyboard reference deck. The feeling. From the feeling, I know what kind of frames to draw.

They commission boards before the agency has signed off on the script. Counter-intuitive. The agency hates it. But the director who knows the script needs three more rewrites is going to use the boards as the rewrite tool — and when the boards come back, the script gets the surgery it needed, and the version the client eventually sees has been pressure-tested at the picture level.

They review with the boarder, not at the boarder. A good director treats the review call as a working session. What happens if we drop frame seven and let frame six breathe. Can you try a wider on frame twelve before we commit. The bad director treats it as a verdict.

They tell me when the production has shifted. If the lock date moves, they tell me. If the agency is fighting with the client, they tell me. If post is going to redesign the title sequence, they tell me. I do not need to know everything — I need to know the things that will change what I draw.

The ten-minute call that saves the production

If a producer reading this takes one thing from this essay, take this: book a ten-minute call between the director and the boarder before the first pass is commissioned. Not a thirty-minute briefing call with the agency. Not a Zoom with the client and the EPs. Ten minutes, director to boarder, on the phone.

Cover the five things above. What the film is about. Which three beats matter. The visual mechanic. What the agency thinks it bought. The lock date.

That call costs the production nothing. The day it saves at the back end is worth, conservatively, between £600 and £1,800 in storyboard rebooking alone, before you count the agency producer’s time, the director’s weekend, the lost slot in the boarder’s diary that the next production will now be denied. [Source — UK day rate benchmarks via the YunoJuno 2025 Freelancer Rates Report, which puts Film & Motion senior freelance rates at £391/day average with the top decile at £753/day.]

A last word

[SEB POV: confirm or rewrite the closing position — draft says: the first pass is the most diagnostic moment in a commercial production. If the director and the boarder are aligned on the first pass, the production runs. If they are not, the production survives — but it survives at the cost of a weekend, a relationship, and the quiet trust the agency has to rebuild with the client the next time something goes wrong.]

Treat the first pass as the cheapest version of the conversation you are about to have. Not the rough draft. Not the throwaway. The conversation.

Then have it properly the first time.

Seb Antoniou is a London-based storyboard artist. His commercial work includes the Premier League’s 30-year anniversary campaign, the Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid launch, Coca-Cola’s “Make Your Home the Home End” with Harry Kane, Nike Air Jordans, Honda, BBC Winter Olympics, NatWest, Amazon Audible, Lexus, Sky VIP with Anthony Joshua, and Wolt. He works with advertising agencies and production companies in London and remotely worldwide.