An American invention, the storyboard appears to us in retrospect as a forceful idea that changed the way films were made and seen forever.

For most of the silent film era, narrative films were usually shot in the “tableaux style”, where static shots were held for the entire duration of a scene. Camera movement was minimal, cuts within a scene comparatively rare, and actors observed a “12-foot rule”, never nearing the lens by less than that margin as they went about their business in spacious landscapes and baroque interiors reminiscent of stage designs. Indeed, the period of filmmaking lasting from cinema’s inception in the 1890s until the end of World War One was a time when film acting and visual storytelling still took their cues from theatre. While silent films may be resurrected contemporarily in the never-ending currents of reappropriative kitsch, the originals— which often resemble recorded plays—may strike the viewer today as quite dated.

It was at the close of narrative film’s nascent stage in the early 1920s that cinema was transformed by international innovations that laid the groundwork for it to assume a central place on the global pop-culture landscape. The German Expressionist art movement modeled moody lighting designs and claustrophobic, angular sets that reflected the inner psychological realities of the troubled characters on screen. The French Impressionist film movement provided new ways of placing and moving the camera that finally made us aware of the camera as an instrument in a medium where the camera was instrumental. And Soviet montage theorists in the same period dared then-experimental ways of atomizing scenes into separate shots, and provided rules for maintaining spatial continuity that still inform our visual expectations of everything from commercials to music videos to this day.

But alongside these was the storyboard, an American contribution. Credited with first being introduced to film by William Cameron Menzies, the act of summarizing a film in sketches before playing it out in reality was an overlooked if obvious way of making sense of the new devices suddenly influencing the tributary of cinema. It was also a way of economizing and managing resources, and was in that sense a stereotypically American budgetary tool in a country where film was still considered big-business, not high-art. Menzies spent the latter 20s using his sketches as publicity devices for productions he was associated with, and giving lectures and magazine interviews to all who would listen on his favorite topic: production design. The historical and commercial consensus is that Menzies’ Sistine Chapel was “Gone With The Wind”—a great and greatly flawed opus of American history, and the first film to credit anyone (Menzies himself) as a “production designer”.

If the tableaux-style treated entire scenes like paintings, storyboards—in tandem with the new styles of visual storytelling inherited from the continent—treated them like series’ of photographs, giving filmmakers opportunities to infuse each still with specific narrative information. Tempted as we might be in America by exceptionalist narratives that make our contributions the sole sinews of progress, storyboards don’t necessarily show us a new way of moving the camera, of piecing together a scene, or of designing a set. Storyboards can’t have the emotional impact that the introduction of method-acting did, will never jar and excite us like a well-placed jump-cut, aren’t poignant like a well-crafted voice-over, and are even dwarfed in importance by other American contributions to film, like sound.

But they do give filmmakers a way of controlling for all of these things, and of organizing a given narrative before cameras have to capture it and actors have to embody it. What an essential device storyboards are took time for me to learn, but as a filmmaker I’d always had a sensitivity towards the power of the photograph and its place in film. One day I was marauding Facebook for trouble and instead found a close friend’s photo—a close-up of a woman’s eyes peering from behind books. I downloaded the image and forgot about, but—to my surprise—I noticed it showed up later in a shot in one of my films.

The torrent of time and events that had elapsed since first discovering the picture did nothing to stop it from becoming an active part of my own process of cinematic reconstruction, and I wonder whether the American engine works the same way for all of us; if images lodged in the collective subconscious become animated, re-enacted, and transformed in moments of crisis and creativity. With their power reinforced, they sink back to the subliminal, only to rise again like the defeated American South that Menzies so sentimentally illustrated in “Gone With The Wind.” The popular understanding of American History in that sense resembles a hashtagged litany of happenings: to click #slavery or #frontier or #july4th is to uncover a string of events, remarks, and personalities that’ve left an indelible mark in the American mind’s wide web of myths. “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies”, tweets Alexander DeTocqueville—dawning a powdered-wig in his avatar—in a remark wedged between a musing by Frederick Douglass and a bigoted remark from Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Now, I used to call a storyboard a “story bored”. I hated doing them and found them tedious, but I also realize that every filmmaker has aspects of the creative process that just don’t come naturally to them at all. Drawing out a scene was the chore of a paddle crafted specifically for my artistic behind. The images were in my head during the writing process, I usually wrote them into the script, and the dramatic dynamics seemed to dictate what the shots would be—so why draw them out? I felt my energy was better spent writing and re-writing, which I could do with endless reserves of energy. But unmitigated enjoyment of an act is sometimes the surest sign that we’re neglecting something somewhere else!

The experience of having a production shutdown on me in the summer of 2012 was a definitive turning point both personally and professionally, and forced me to ask some difficult questions about my creative approach, and even my motives for wanting to be a filmmaker. In dark private moments—away from the harsh glare of gossip, bad press, bad blood, and threatened lawsuits that mark the unsuccessful end of any production—I came to the conclusion that embracing the storyboard as a device and not a chore would work wonders as far as communicating more clearly with my collaborators in the future, saving time and money that wouldn’t have to be spent setting up shots that would never be taken, and even reducing the amount of energy I had to expend communicating to others—in the moment—what could’ve been clear for months.

The way I began warming to the idea of pre-visualizing a filmic situation was slow and deliberate. As the season changed from summer to autumn, I singled out storyboards as a fetish, devoured any credible source I could find online, and sent verbose summaries via Facebook—usually at around 3:30AM—to friends I thought would be interested in hearing about what I’d read. It started with familiarizing myself with how films were shot and made before storyboards arrived on the landscape, and then morphed into learning about the ways they changed the dynamics of production once introduced.

Once I could say for certain that and how storyboards mattered in film history, I went and joined Instagram: remembering that one of my favorite shots in an earlier film project came from seeing a random photo in my Facebook newsfeed, I decided on converting time which might otherwise be spent idling online into something more productive. I didn’t see a way of framing an image or get inspiration for a particular story, but thought I needed to find a way to acclimatize myself to trying to understand a scene based on a single, isolated image. Inundated as we are with information from the lives of others, I came to understand each photo I saw—however mundane or momentous— as a frame stolen from a scene; a scene stolen from a character; a character stolen from a drama.

And once that mental groundwork had been laid, there was nothing left but to begin actually storyboarding my own scenes—not perfunctorily, as I’d done in the past, but to gain self-awareness of a scene’s meaning based on a summary of the images it had to offer the viewer. The drawings were, and still are, quite crude, but gaining proficiency as an illustrator was never the point. Over the course of making a commitment to draw once-a-day for 4 months, the habit grew from painstaken, to passable, to out-and-out enjoyable. I found illustrating storyboards a meditative process that afforded me the time and ability to process and compartmentalize technical or creative problems elsewhere in the filmmaking process. I liken drawing storyboards to day-dreaming with a pencil.

One day—while diagramming a scene where a character suddenly pulls over to the side of the road to sink his hands into the sand of the desert that was gradually wearing on his fragile psyche—I remembered once how, at age 6 or 7, I wanted nothing more for my next birthday than, of all things, a pair of cowboy boots. It didn’t matter that we lived in housing projects in New York City, and that my only connection to the desert was the cartoon featuring Roadrunner.

But at some point while imbibing the quintessentially American image of the cowboy on the frontier, I identified with it so intensely that I wanted to embody them. And at some point, 20 years later, while constructing new images, avenues of the lived American past—mine, and perhaps yours, too—became more accessible…even as they made the future clearer in ways I’m only beginning to understand. That a society was founded on the idea that raking reality from whim constitutes the pursuit of happiness may be cause for celebration after all; and we celebrate nothing on July 4^th if not the idea that turning a mountain into a portrait based on well-constructed blueprints is a possibility.