Whilst researching for another project, I have come across a very nifty tool to aid in storyboarding and scoping out video projects. Now to many, I suspect this may garner a “what you have only found that now!” response, and if so, so be it, but as a very happy Microsoft OneNote user, this has not been on my radar particularly for this specific task.

It’s called Evernote; and yes I am actually aware of the product, but wasn’t aware of a single feature that sparked the idea. That feature is the ability to use Evernote in my Windows 7 phone to take photos and store them immediately and directly into Evernote.

This together with the although limited but useful list making tools using checkboxes and so on means that a storyboard can be quickly created or a stills combination of a shooting site can be assembled and used to arrange a shot list / script.
This combined with the sharing facilities of Evernote across the web makes it an ideal collaboration tool for filmmakers, production folk and actors who may not be easily able to meet up regularly face to face.

And better still, it’s free at http://evernote.com/download/

While there are dedicated tools for this sort of thing, and certainly other things such as OneNote can be adapted to do the same thing, what makes Evernote particularly attractive is its multi-OS availability for Windows, Mac iOS, Blackberry, Palm, Windows Phone, WEBOS and Android.