Free Storyboard Template Grid Generator

Broadcast engineering answered with two nested rectangles. Action safe was the region within which important picture content should sit; title safe, a little smaller, was where text had to sit. The traditional values are 93% and 90% of the full frame — insets of 3.5% and 5% on each side — and they are written down: the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers publishes them as “RP 218: Safe Action and Safe Title Areas for Television”.

This overlay draws those two exactly, plus a third at 95% labelled motion safe, which is a working margin rather than a broadcast standard — a reminder that a subject at the very edge of action safe has nowhere to move to.

Cathode-ray tubes are gone and overscan with them, and it would be reasonable to expect the convention to have gone too. It has not, because the underlying problem generalised.

The modern version is that you do not control the frame your work is displayed in. A film shot for 2.39:1 gets cropped for a 16:9 broadcast and again for a 9:16 phone. A 16:9 video gets a platform's interface overlaid on its bottom fifth. A television station adds a bug in one corner and a ticker along the bottom.

Each of those is a crop or an occlusion you cannot see at the point of framing, and the discipline of keeping essentials away from the edge is exactly the same discipline that overscan required.

So the numbers survive, and are still worth following even for work that will only ever be seen at full frame — because "only ever" is a prediction, and predictions about where a piece of video ends up have a poor record.

The aspect presets cover the five that account for nearly all current delivery. 16:9 is broadcast and most streaming. 2.39:1 is the modern anamorphic cinema standard. 4:3 is the classic television and Academy-adjacent ratio, now used mostly as a deliberate period signal. 1:1 and 9:16 are social.

That list has a history compressed into it. 4:3 was the standard from the earliest film through to the end of analogue television, chosen originally to match 35 mm silent film. Widescreen cinema formats arrived in the 1950s in direct response to television, and 16:9 was chosen decades later as a compromise between the widescreen ratios then in use.

The vertical formats are the newest and the most disruptive, because they invert the assumption every previous ratio shared. A 9:16 frame is not a cropped 16:9 — it is a different composition, and the standard advice to shoot wide and crop later produces vertical video that looks like cropped horizontal video, because it is.

Which is the argument for choosing the aspect before drawing rather than after. The frame determines what a shot can contain, where a figure can stand, and how much headroom is available, and all of those are decisions made at the storyboard stage or made badly later.

The frame is centred with a 5% margin on whatever canvas you are working on, so a 9:16 vertical frame drawn on a landscape sheet sits in the middle with space either side rather than being clipped. That matters practically because storyboard pads are landscape and a lot of current work is vertical.

The thirds are drawn inside the frame rather than across the canvas, and the distinction is easy to overlook and important. A thirds grid on the page is about the page; a thirds grid on the frame is about the shot, and only the second one means anything.

Whether thirds are the right compositional aid for a moving image is a separate question with a reasonable answer: they are a starting point that works well for static compositions and less well for shots with movement, where the subject is somewhere else half a second later.

Storyboarding practice itself is older than the safe-area convention. John Hart traces it to the Disney studio of the early 1930s in The Art of the Storyboard: A Filmmaker's Introduction (2nd ed., Focal Press, 2008), where pinning drawings to a board let a sequence be assessed and reordered before any animation was made — which is still the reason it exists.

The economics were the point then and are the point now. A shot re-drawn on a board costs minutes; the same shot re-staged after it has been built, lit and shot costs a day. The board is where a sequence's problems are supposed to be found.

That is also why the safe areas belong on the board rather than only in the edit. A composition that puts its subject in the outer 7% is a problem to find at the drawing stage, not after a crew has spent a morning on it. Sequential panels on a page have the same problem in a different shape, which the comic panel layout generator handles.

For animation the safe areas do double duty, because the field guide traditionally used for camera moves has its own equivalent. A pan that ends with the subject outside action safe is a pan that ends wrong, and drawing the safe rectangle on the extremes of a move is standard practice.

For social delivery there is a further layer this overlay does not attempt: platform interface obstructions, which differ per platform and change without notice. Those belong to the social media safe-area overlay rather than here, because they are platform data rather than broadcast geometry.

One number worth carrying: on a 1920 × 1080 frame, title safe at 90% means an inset of 96 pixels at each side and 54 at top and bottom. Those are the figures to check a delivered file against if you are ever in doubt about a spec.

The frame draws over your own drawing rather than exporting a fixed template because the check is against a specific composition. A blank frame with safe areas is a printable, and printables are plentiful; a frame over your drawing is a test.

The export sizes itself from the paper format and the DPI you choose rather than from your screen, so a board printed at A4 and 600 DPI has fine, accurate rules. SVG keeps every rectangle editable as a template layer.

Everything runs in your browser. Images you load are never uploaded, because there is no server for them to reach. The drawing, the transform and the export all happen on your own machine.