The word, and the work
Previs is short for previsualization, and the long word is the honest one: it is seeing the film before it exists. Not imagining it — every director does that — but seeing it in a form other people can look at, argue with and sign. A previs sequence shows where the camera is, what it sees, how long it holds, how the subject moves through the frame and how one shot cuts against the next. It is built cheaply, from stand-ins rather than actors and from a sketch of the set rather than the set, and that cheapness is the point. A decision that is expensive to make on the day is nearly free to make here, and a decision made here survives to the day intact.
The craft grew up in visual-effects work, where a shot that involves a crane, a stunt, a creature and a plate has too many moving parts to be discovered at dawn with a crew waiting. It has since become ordinary on any production where the shot is complicated or the money is: commercials, music videos, title sequences, the set pieces of a feature, anything with a camera move that has to be built. What previs settles is the same in every case — blocking, lensing and continuity — and those three words are the whole subject.
Storyboard, animatic, previs, techvis
Four documents, often confused, each promising something different. A storyboard is a sequence of drawn frames with notes. It settles composition and order: what is in the frame and what comes next. It does not settle time, and it does not settle whether the shot can be made — a board can draw a camera move that no rig can execute and a lens that does not exist, and a good board artist will draw exactly that if asked, because the board's job is intent.
An animatic is the storyboard given time. The frames are cut together, held for as long as each shot will run, usually against scratch dialogue, a temp score or a metronome. It settles rhythm: whether the scene plays, whether the joke lands, whether the chase reads. An animatic is the first moment a sequence can be felt rather than described, and it is where a great many scenes are quietly shortened. It still does not settle the camera, because the frames are drawings and a drawing has no lens.
Previs puts the camera in the world. The set is a space with dimensions, the subject stands in it, and the camera is an object with a focal length, a height and a path. Now the question is no longer what the shot should feel like but what it is: a 35mm from four metres at eye level, pushing in over three seconds, the subject three-quarter to the lens with the window behind. The frame that comes back is the frame the day will give you, give or take the performance. Previs settles the shot, and it settles continuity — the same face, the same wardrobe, the same room, across every angle of the scene.
Techvis is previs turned into a plan a crew can build from. It takes the settled camera and asks the physical questions: how long a track, how tall a crane, where the sun will be at the call time, whether the wall has to come out for the wide. Techvis is the bridge from the picture to the schedule. A production that skips it discovers its answers with a tape measure on the morning of the shoot.
Put simply: a storyboard says what, an animatic says when, previs says how, and techvis says with what. A production can get by with fewer than four. It cannot get by with the wrong one — an animatic offered as previs is a beautiful way to find out on set that the shot was never designed.
What changes at the planning stage versus on set
Every decision about a shot gets made somewhere. The only question is whether it is made in a room where changing it costs a minute, or on a set where changing it costs the day. On set, a lens change is a lens change. A camera height that turns out to be wrong is a rebuild of the rig and a re-light. A continuity mistake — the wardrobe that changed, the prop that moved — is either a reshoot or a note in the edit that reads, forever, as an error. A director who is discovering the shot on the day is spending the most expensive hours the production will ever buy on work that could have been done for nothing.
At the planning stage the same decisions are cheap, reversible and shared. Cheap, because a stand-in and a sketch of the set cost nothing to move. Reversible, because the fifth version of the shot costs what the first did. Shared, because a settled shot is something a producer can schedule, a cinematographer can light for, a first assistant can time, an art department can build to and a client can approve — all against the same frame, before anyone is paid to stand on a floor. The value of previs is not the picture. It is that the picture is a decision that has already been made, and everyone downstream is working from it rather than towards it.
There is a second change, less discussed. On set, continuity is a person with a binder and a camera phone, catching what they can. In planning, continuity can be a rule: this is the face, this is the coat, this is the room, and every frame is checked against them before it is approved. That turns the most common class of expensive mistake into one that is caught on a screen, at the planning stage, where catching it costs nothing.
How the six studios map to it
PREVIZ is built on that map. The work of previs — intent, order, the frame, the space, the motion, and the continuity that runs through all of them — is split across six studios that hand each other a decision rather than a file, and each one corresponds to a stage a production already recognises.
- Infinitum. The on-ramp: a director agent on an infinite canvas, working across the other five studios from conversation.
- Script. The intent layer — what we are making and for whom.
- Storyboard. The plan — order, beats, coverage, structure.
- Keyframe. The hero still — high-fidelity image with full continuity.
- CineForge 3D. The space — 3D scenes, props, camera blocking.
- Director. The output — animation, video, deliverable.
Script is the storyboard's what, read as structured data — scenes, characters, locations, props, and a shot list at the density the production needs. Storyboard is the animatic's when, with a frame against every line and selects carried forward. Keyframe is the frame a production signs: cast, wardrobe, set and grade locked at the resolution that is needed, with the lock travelling into every shot made after it. CineForge is previs and techvis in one room — the set built in three dimensions with real materials and a lighting rig, the camera an object with a height and a lens, so a note about the left-hand lamp is a note about a lamp. Director is motion from an approved frame, with cost and duration quoted before a take is committed. And Infinitum is the way in: a board where the whole idea lives and a director agent that plans a sequence from a paragraph, holding the locked cast by name and handing the work to the studio that owns the next decision.
Underneath all six sits the part that makes the map more than a metaphor. A locked identity is attached to every generation in every studio, every locked render is graded against it, and 99 rendering engines are routed per shot behind one policy, so the decision made in one room is already true in the next. That is what previs has always been for. It is simply, now, something a small team can do on a Tuesday.
Where to start
If you have a script, start in Script and let it build the shot list. If you have a board, start in Storyboard and put a frame against every line. If you have one frame you love, lock it in Keyframe and let the rest of the production inherit it. If you have a set to design, stage it in CineForge before you light it. And if you have a paragraph and an afternoon, start in Infinitum and see what comes back. The technique library explains the named moves you will reach for along the way, and the glossary defines the words.