What is a boardomatic and how is it different from a storyboard and animatic?

A boardomatic is your storyboard images laid out on a timeline with a voiceover track underneath — a rough video cut of static frames used to test pacing before shooting. A storyboard is the static panels themselves; an animatic goes further, adding actual motion within the frames. The boardomatic sits between the two: timing and audio, no animation.

Use the three terms as three levels of motion. A storyboard is a set of static panels — drawn or generated frames showing each shot's composition, one image per shot, with no timing information at all. A boardomatic takes those exact panels and cuts them onto a timeline: each frame holds for its intended shot length, a voiceover runs underneath, and music or sound design is layered as a separate track on top. Nothing inside the frames moves — the value is that you can now feel the pacing and hear the film. An animatic is the next step up in polish: the frames themselves carry motion — animated elements, camera pushes, character movement — so it plays closer to the finished film. In short: storyboard = images, boardomatic = images + time + audio, animatic = images + time + audio + motion.

The boardomatic's job is decision-making before production. As Hridaye, invideo's creative director, describes it, it's "something to put in front of your team, your DOP, or your client before a single day of shooting" — you catch pacing problems, dead scenes, and unclear beats while they still cost nothing to fix. Traditionally that came at a real price: boardomatics from a specialist take 2–3 weeks and run $5,000–$10,000, and even a simpler animatic built with a storyboard artist takes about a week and $500–$2,000.

You can now assemble one in a working session. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with a built-in timeline called Slate, so once you have storyboard frames, ask the invideo agent to line them up on Slate — no downloading individual frames — then adjust each frame's length and placement, record or generate the voiceover track, and layer sound design on top as its own track. In one documented run this produced a full animatic in half a day for under $50, and the result is presentable to a DOP, agency creative team, or client as-is. The same logic applies whether you're an ad filmmaker, a VFX artist previzzing a sequence, or a director testing a cut of your own film.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

It's basically all your storyboard images laid out on a timeline with your voiceover under it

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director