What is the best workflow for going from storyboard to finished AI video?

Run storyboard-to-finished-video as a six-stage pipeline: load script and storyboard into a creative producer agent, lock character sheets and world references, generate shots act-by-act in Always Ask mode with the style block attached, select and stitch the keepers, send the rough cut back to the agent for notes, then finish in your editor. The invideo agent holds context across every stage so the storyboard, not the prompt, drives the film.

Start by loading the full script and the storyboard into a creative producer agent inside invideo — this agent holds the script, shot breakdown, character details, and style block, and grounds every downstream sub-agent in the same vision. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with every current video and image model (Runway, Veo, Kling, Seedance 2.0, Recraft, Nano Banana, GPT-Image-2) and upscalers like Topaz Astra available behind the agent, so each stage below routes to the right model without you switching platforms.

1. Brief and script load. Upload the complete screenplay so the agent has full narrative context — arcs, themes, motifs — before any frame is built. Force four pre-production answers up front: who the character is, who/what the antagonist is, what each key prop is, and the delivery format. These four answers will change every frame, so locking them now prevents redo loops later.

2. Storyboard ingestion and shot list. Feed the storyboard frames in and ask the agent to produce a shot list keyed to your boards — one row per shot with shot length, lens, lighting, blocking, and a negative prompt. If your storyboard is sparse, ask a storyboard sub-agent to visualize missing coverage from the script before you direct anything. With multi-shot video models, you don't need one board per second — a single board can seed a 15-second sequence.

3. Consistency lock — frames before video. Generate four options each for character sheets and environment plates, pick the strongest, and lock them into the agent's context. Use GPT-Image-2 or Nano Banana for character sheets (multiple angles plus a close-up so small details survive across shots), Recraft for photoreal portraits where skin texture matters. Nothing moves to video until these are approved — this single step is what kills consistency drift later. One documented production locked a character in 5 generations at ~$9.78 per character; another generated 11 reference images covering four characters and one prop before a single video clip ran.

4. Per-shot generation, act by act. Work through one act at a time at 25% increments — don't try to generate the whole film in one pass, or the agent loses context. For each shot, attach the locked character sheets and the style block, write directorial intent ("hold on him until he lunges, no cutting back") rather than technical prompts, and run in Always Ask mode so you approve every prompt before credits spend. Let the agent route the shot to the right model: Seedance 2.0 reference-to-video for shots that need to carry character and location context across clips, Kling or Veo where its strengths fit the beat. For complex scenes, run two DOP sub-agents on the same scene in parallel for option coverage. Expect about 3 generations per usable shot, and treat each generated clip as a source of 4–7 candidate seconds, not one finished shot — the editorial yield in one documented Arcane-style episode was 41 of 164 clips, ~5 seconds used from each 15-second generation.

5. Select, stitch, and Frankenstein. Pull the strongest seconds from each generation; where no single clip nails the full shot, stitch the best segments from two or more generations into one composite — a "Frankenstein shot" — and treat that as your finished take. In one documented production, 17 of the final shots were composited this way. Log any manually edited frames back into the agent so its shot breakdown stays accurate.

6. Maker-checker pass and finish. Before you cut, send the rough assembly back to the invideo agent with an open "what's working, what's not" prompt — it catches pacing errors, sound-design gaps, and emotional-register mismatches a human editor often misses. One documented production caught an entity-reveal shot running at the wrong emotional stage this way. Then assemble in your editor of choice, run an upscale pass through a sub-agent you name ("Upscale Artist") routing to Topaz Astra, and color/grain the final cut.

As Hridaye, invideo's creative director, puts it: "One agent that reads your treatment once and holds every directive across every shot, every scene. No re-prompting. No drift. So now, you direct, and the Agent remembers." That persistence is what lets the storyboard, not the prompt, drive the film.

What this costs in practice. Across documented productions, finished AI video runs $315–$750 per finished minute depending on team and approach — a 3-minute animated episode at $950 total ($315/min, 2 people, 2 days), a 70-second narrative short at $750 (3,000 credits, 2 days), a ~90-second horror short at $870 (4,100 credits, 2 days), a 2-minute brand promo at $1,500 (6,000–6,500 credits, 3 days, 8 parallel agents). Generation volume scales with ambition: 164 video clips for the 3-minute episode, ~400 video generations plus 30 image generations for the horror short.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

One agent that reads your treatment once and holds every directive across every shot, every scene. No re-prompting. No drift. So now, you direct, and the Agent remembers.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director