How do you get creative director approval on AI video before spending generation credits?

Run a storyboard-first approval gate: generate every key frame as a still image with GPT-Image-2, lay the frames out as one vertical composite storyboard, and get your creative director's sign-off on that image. Only after approval does the invideo agent attach the storyboard to Seedance 2.0 to animate it — so video credits are spent exclusively on approved compositions.

Lock your reference assets before you storyboard. Generate character sheets (front, side, three-quarter angles plus facial close-ups) and location reference sheets in a single pass, then lock the finals — approval on a frame is only meaningful if the character and location it shows won't drift later. Every revision during review should start from these locked base images, never from scratch.

Generate the key frames as stills, not video. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with all the current image and video models available, so you can route this step to GPT-Image-2: generate each scene's key frames as still images and lay them out as a single vertical composite storyboard in your film's aspect ratio. Image generation costs a fraction of video generation, which is the entire mechanism of the gate. As invideo's documented workflow puts it: "For high-stakes scenes - Storyboard first. Lay out the key frames as one vertical image. The Agent attaches it to Seedance and animates from it. Lower credits spent, higher control."

Circulate the composite for sign-off. The storyboard is a single image, so your creative director can review it anywhere — mark up framing, blocking, and lighting per panel. Iterate on the flagged frames as stills, regenerating from the locked base images, until every panel is approved. On team productions, keep the storyboard, scripts, and reference sheets in one centrally uploaded context so everyone reviews the same version — any change is updated once and every sub-agent inherits it.

Animate only after approval. Once signed off, the invideo agent attaches the approved composite to Seedance 2.0 reference-to-video, which animates from the storyboard while holding the composition, lighting, and character positions your creative director approved. If the scene runs multiple shots, the approved frames can also chain as layout references so continuity carries across the sequence.

Apply the gate selectively. Storyboard-first trades away the unexpected shots the model would generate freely, so reserve it for high-stakes or complex scenes; for insert shots and passing montage beats, prompting the video model directly from the script description is sufficient and skips the extra image step. One documented production ran this gate at scale: a 3-person crew shipped a 10-episode microdrama series in 3 days at roughly $1,000 per episode, with storyboard approval preventing credit spend on shots the creative director would have rejected.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

Your creative director can approve every storyboard frame before even a single credit is spent on video.

— invideo's creative team