This week, while working on the next Flash tutorial, I made a mistake that I hadn't stumbled over since animation school: I dove right into working on the animation steps without any sort of planning, thinking I could just improvise as I went as it as a fairly simple project.

An hour later I had scrapped my work and done what I should have done in the first place: taken the five minutes to sketch a quick thumbnail storyboard to keep me on track. Storyboarding is an essential skill to animation, and a rather old-fashioned pencil-to-paper tool that will never go out of style--and here's a few quick reasons why.