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Using AI To Storyboard Before You Shoot Anything
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
Storyboards get skipped constantly, on the reasoning that the shot list in
your head is close enough and drawing it out is a step for bigger
productions. Then you're on set, the light's changing, and you're making
composition decisions in real time that would have taken thirty seconds to
settle the night before. The boarding step isn't about the drawing — it's
about finding the problems while they're still free to fix.
The rule: a storyboard's job is to surface problems before they cost you
anything — a generated board that does this in minutes instead of hours is
worth using precisely because it removes the excuse to skip the step, not
because the images themselves are the deliverable.
The mechanism
- Describe each shot as a sentence before generating anything — subject,
framing, what happens in it. If you can't write the sentence, that's a
shot that isn't planned yet, tool or no tool.
- Generate a rough frame per shot, not a polished one. The point is
sequence and composition, not final image quality — treat these as
disposable working sketches.
- Lay the sequence out in order and look for the actual failure modes:
does the eye know where to go next, does a cut make sense next to its
neighbour, is there a shot doing the same job as the one before it.
- Cut or merge shots that don't earn their place before you shoot, not
after, while it still costs nothing.
- Check it against timing, roughly — if a sequence of boards implies
more shots than your shoot day or your runtime can actually hold, that's
the moment to trim, not the edit.
What to skip
Skip trying to get the generated frames to match your final look and
lighting — that's a different job with a different tool, and chasing it
here wastes time on a deliverable nobody needs yet. And skip boarding
every single shot for something genuinely simple and short — match the
level of boarding to how much could actually go wrong on the day.
Guardrails
- A storyboard, generated or hand-drawn, tells you about sequence and
composition — it won't reliably predict performance, timing on
dialogue, or how a location actually reads in person. Scout the
location and rehearse separately.
- Generated reference frames are a planning tool, not shot-matched final
frames — don't hand them to a client or crew as a promise of the final
look without saying plainly that's what they are.
- If the board reveals the concept itself doesn't hold together across a
full sequence, that's a script problem, not a shot-list problem — fix it
there before boarding again.
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