What is a boardomatic and how much does it cost to make one?
Last updated August 1, 2026
A boardomatic is your storyboard images laid out on a timeline with a voiceover track underneath — a rough cut of your film before you shoot anything. Traditionally one costs $5,000–$10,000 and takes 2–3 weeks; assembled with AI on a timeline tool like invideo's Slate, it takes half a day and under $50.
A boardomatic is the simplest form of pre-visualization: your storyboard frames sequenced on a timeline, timed to a voiceover, with sound design layered as a separate track on top. It gives you something concrete to put in front of your team, your DOP, or your client before a single day of shooting — and it surfaces pacing problems, missing shots, and story gaps while they're still cheap to fix.
What it costs depends almost entirely on how you make it:
Approach | Cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
Traditional boardomatic (studio pipeline) | $5,000–$10,000 | 2–3 weeks |
Storyboard artist animatic | $500–$2,000 | ~1 week |
AI-assembled on invideo's Slate | Under $50 | Half a day |
The spread is real: documented traditional boardomatics ran $5,000–$10,000 over 2–3 weeks, while a full AI-assembled animatic came in at under $50 in half a day — a cost reduction of roughly 99% on the same deliverable.
How the under-$50 version works. Generate or scan your storyboard frames, then ask the invideo agent to line them up on Slate — invideo's built-in timeline — so you never download each frame separately. Once the frames are on the timeline you control length, placement, and audio per shot: record or generate your voiceover underneath, then layer sound design as its own track. In one documented production, this produced a client-ready animatic in half a day. If you already cut in an NLE, the same assembly works in Adobe Premiere Pro — you just lose the in-agent handoff and have to export frames manually.
A boardomatic is presentation-grade for pre-production: it's viable to show a DOP, creative team, or client as-is. If you need moving video previz rather than timed static frames, that's a different tier — AI video previz workflows run roughly $150–$200 per minute of output depending on the accuracy you 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