How long does it take to make an animatic with AI vs. a storyboard artist?
Last updated August 10, 2026
An AI animatic takes about half a day and costs under $50; a storyboard artist typically takes a week and charges $500–$2,000 for the same deliverable. Fuller traditional boardomatic packages run 2–3 weeks and $5,000–$10,000. The AI route compresses the timeline roughly 10x and the cost by 90% or more.
Budget half a day for an AI animatic versus a week for a storyboard-artist pipeline — that is the documented gap, and the cost gap is even wider. Here are the numbers side by side:
Approach | Time | Cost |
|---|---|---|
AI animatic (assembled on invideo's Slate timeline) | Half a day | Under $50 |
Storyboard artist animatic | ~1 week | $500–$2,000 |
Traditional boardomatic package | 2–3 weeks | $5,000–$10,000 |
Takeaway: across documented baselines, traditional routes run one to three weeks and $500–$10,000; the AI route lands in hours for under $50.
Why the AI route is fast. An animatic (or boardomatic) is your storyboard images laid out on a timeline with a voiceover track underneath, plus sound design layered as a separate track. None of those steps requires hand-drawing or a booking lead time — that is where the week disappears. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with a built-in timeline (Slate), so the whole assembly happens in one place: generate your storyboard frames with an image model like GPT-Image-2 or Nano Banana, ask the invideo agent to line them up on Slate — no downloading individual frames — then control length, placement, and audio directly on the timeline. Record or generate your narration, drop it under the images, and layer sound effects on top.
Where your half day actually goes. The generation itself takes minutes; your time goes into curation and pacing. Handpick the frames you like rather than using everything the invideo agent generates — that selection step is what keeps an AI animatic from looking generic — then adjust each frame's duration on the timeline until the cut plays at the rhythm of your intended scene.
Where a storyboard artist's week goes. A traditional artist draws each panel to spec, iterates on your notes panel by panel, and then someone still has to assemble the frames, voiceover, and sound in an edit tool. Revisions restart the drawing loop, which is why changes that take minutes in an AI workflow add days to a traditional one.
What the AI animatic is good enough for. It is a presentable pre-production deliverable — something to put in front of your DOP, creative team, or client before a single day of shooting — and it serves the same purpose as the traditional version: catching production pitfalls before they cost you on set.
Beyond the animatic itself: if you need animated video previz rather than static frames on a timeline, documented AI workflows run $150–$200 per output minute for most use cases, up to $1,500–$2,000 per minute for exact camera-movement control — still far under the tens of thousands traditional previz costs.
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