How do you make a boardomatic with AI for film pre-production?

A boardomatic is your storyboard images laid out on a timeline with a voiceover track underneath — and with AI you can build one in half a day for under $50. The workflow: load your locked production documents into the invideo agent, generate storyboard frames with GPT-Image-2, hand-pick the best, line them up on Slate, then add narration and sound design.

Start by loading context before you generate anything. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with the current image and video models plus a built-in timeline, so the whole boardomatic runs in one place. Create an agent and upload the four documents you've locked so far: your character sheet, location sheet, shot breakdown, and look-and-feel document. This context-first step is what drives accuracy — without it, generations drift on look and angle from frame to frame.

Step 1 — Generate your storyboard frames. Ask the invideo agent to produce nine-panel storyboard grids with GPT-Image-2 in your film's aspect ratio, working from your shot breakdown. Because the four documents are attached to every generation, the frames come back close to the first frames of your actual film. Nano Banana works as an alternative for hero look-and-feel frames if a specific image needs another pass.

Step 2 — Hand-pick and lock your shots. Don't use everything the invideo agent returns. Curate: pick the frames that match your shot breakdown, discard the rest, and compile your selections into a finalized grid. Selection and locking must happen before assembly — it's a discrete step, not an afterthought.

Step 3 — Line the frames up on Slate. Ask the invideo agent to place your locked frames on Slate, its timeline, so you never download each shot separately. On the timeline you control length, placement, and audio per frame — hold time on key shots, tighten transitions elsewhere. Adobe Premiere Pro works if you prefer an external timeline, but you'll be exporting frames manually.

Step 4 — Add voiceover, then sound design. Record or generate your narration and place it as the track under the images — that voiceover-under-boards structure is what makes it a boardomatic rather than a slideshow. Layer sound design as a separate track on top of the image and voiceover timeline.

Step 5 — Put it in front of your team. The finished boardomatic is something to show your DOP, creative team, or client before a single day of shooting — it surfaces pacing problems, missing coverage, and treatment disagreements while they're still free to fix. The full assembly runs half a day and under $50; a traditional storyboard-artist animatic runs a week and $500–$2,000, and documented boardomatic productions have run $5,000–$10,000 over 2–3 weeks.

Beyond the boardomatic itself: if you need moving previz rather than static boards, the same context-loaded invideo agent can animate your locked grids through models like Seedance 2.0 or Kling — documented animated previz workflows run $150–$200 per minute at the accuracy tiers most directors need.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

Half a day, under $50. The old way: a week with a storyboard artist, and $500 to $2,000.

— invideo's creative team