While casting and script revision continued, Welles formed the principal behind-the-camera team that would manage the production of Citizen Kane: cinematographer Gregg Toland and designer Perry Ferguson.

Beginning in late spring of 1940, Welles, Toland, Ferguson, and some of their assistants met most mornings during preproduction of Citizen Kane to discuss the photography and set design, and to refine the visual plan that would bring the film to the screen.

This plan would become the foundation of the project, out of which every shot, the production design, and the postproduction of the film would be established.

The Welles-Toland-Ferguson meetings produced two results: First, each meeting was an intensified classroom in which Welles was learning from two experts the practical day-to-day business of being a filmmaker.

Second, the planning sessions refined the visual plan and the basic look of the film, as well as the mind-boggling level of strategizing they needed for all of the shots.

All motion pictures require planning, but typically much less than Welles needed for Citizen Kane. In the assembly-line environment of the Hollywood studio system in the 1940s, most projects had weeks, not months, for preparation; the extended preproduction period granted to Welles was a rare luxury.

And for Welles, the cinematography and design were not simply tools to make a movie.  For Citizen Kane, his goal was for every shot, the entire design, and all of the photographic techniques employed in the film to be integral parts of the story itself.

By the time preproduction progressed to its final stages, the RKO staff as supervised by Welles, Toland, and Ferguson had created storyboards—detailed sketches of scenes, nearly all drawn by studio artist Charles Ohmann.  The storyboards included not only precise camera angles shot-by-shot illustrations of complex sequences, but in some cases also the ideas to create transitions between scenes.

Welles thus knew how every important sequence of the motion picture would look, weeks before shooting of Production #281 began.

How they would arrive at that point was the challenge for Toland and Ferguson…