It’s crucial for the environmental animation that the flow of time be depicted beforehand otherwise when it gets created everything might fall apart at the seams and not flow correctly this could cause a bunch of issues in the long run so the creation of a storyboard is required as “The storyboard is a very important part of the pre-production process because it clearly conveys how the story will flow” (Elemental media, 2022) 

Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning information does not speak of storyboards directly however it speaks of schedules, graphs, and life cycles which in essence are all storyboards and vice versa they each tell a story of something and how that story is laid out the format might be different but the information is the same. “Our strategy for understanding these narrative graphics is to hold constant the underlying information and they to watch how various designs and designers cope with the common data” (Tufte, 1990, P.97)

Storyboards are a great way to depict the flow of time and understand how everything is going to be laid out for this animation there are going to be key events that will dictate the main flow of the overall animation you can tell the change that has been made in each frame without the accompanying text.