Storyboarding is key to planning great videos, but old methods can feel slow and frustrating. With AI, you can create visuals for your ideas in minutes and share them easily. These tools help you convey your vision, receive feedback more quickly, and start your projects with creative confidence. Whether you’re a solo creator or part of a team, AI storyboarding helps you work faster, tell better stories, and impress your clients with clear, professional pre-production materials.
What is storyboarding?
Storyboarding is a visual plan for your video that consists of a sequence of drawings or images that illustrate how each scene will appear. It helps you organize ideas, decide on camera angles and pacing, and communicate your vision to your team or clients.
Why storyboarding matters (more than ever)
A strong storyboard helps you plan shots, sell ideas, secure funding, and get everyone excited about your project.
As competition grows and audiences expect polished content, a clear storyboard can mean the difference between your video getting made or your pitch being overlooked. When clients can see your ideas visualized early, it’s easier for them to sign off on milestones, reducing back-and-forth and preventing costly reshoots.
Storyboards turn ideas into clear visuals that keep everyone on the same page, making video production run more smoothly. Planning with a storyboard reduces costly mistakes on set and ensures your team understands exactly what they’re creating before you start filming. By mapping out the pacing, you can meet audiences’ expectations for faster, sharper content. Early storyboards also help you establish tone and mood so you can experiment with the creative direction and find the best way to tell your story.
Building a storyboard with AI: a step-by-step guide
Start building professional storyboards faster with this step-by-step guide to using AI tools for every part of the process.
Steps to building a storyboard with AI
Select the storyboard style that best suits your project. With Artlist, you have 20 styles to choose from, including photorealistic, comic noir, and a more traditional hand-drawn style.
Use AI image generation by typing simple prompts to quickly create scenes without needing to draw. Then, bring these images to life with the animate button, adding movement that shows pacing and camera motion. If needed, adjust angles and styles or refine character poses until your storyboard aligns with your vision or your client’s expectations.
Bring your storyboard to life by adding a voiceover. AI voice generation tools allow you to fine-tune the accent, tone, and style of your narration to suit your project.Â
1. Type a prompt or upload audio to the voice over generator.
2. Add your script to the text box.
3. Choose the style of voice you want to use.
4. Set the language, gender, and speed of your voiceover.
5. You can also apply accents to your narration.
6. Hit the generate button and wait for your audio to be created.
Voiceover generators allow you to try many different tones, styles, and accents, allowing you to test which works best for your audience.
Use Image to image refinement to maintain consistent and polished visuals. AI video filters add color grading or mood effects, helping you set the emotional tone upfront — super helpful if you have a client who needs to approve the style before you move into production.
An AI assistant can help you tighten pacing or cut dialogue instantly, saving time while keeping your story sharp. AI editors can save you hours of boring rushes and cuts early in the editing process by cutting out ums, errs, and pauses, or trimming the start and end of your clips to only the dialogue sections.Â
Quicker edits enable you to respond to feedback more quickly and make adjustments on the fly without having to rebuild the entire storyboard.
AI-powered search lets you find music, footage, or templates instantly, streamlining your workflow. For creators, faster searching means more time spent crafting your narrative.Â
Clients can also benefit from faster revisions and more polished storyboards since you can quickly and accurately gather everything you need.
Use Artboards to store assets and ideas in one place. With an Artboard, you can save music, narration, images, and video to a single project board, giving you a stylistic and tonal overview of your project. This makes it easier to present cohesive storyboards to your client and simplifies collaboration with teams, ensuring everyone stays aligned throughout the project.
Real-world examples of AI storyboarding
Seeing AI storyboarding in action demonstrates the immense power of these tools for both creators and clients.
Commercials created with Artlist AI
Brands and agencies are already using Artlist’s AI tools to storyboard and produce commercials with impressive results. By turning ideas into visuals quickly, they’re able to pitch concepts, refine details, and deliver polished videos faster. Clients appreciate seeing clear storyboards upfront, which enables them to approve concepts sooner and avoid costly rework.
Artlist’s most recent campaign is a surreal, playful blend of sport and food, featuring tiny plastic-like figures diving into jelly, skating on martini ice cubes, and scaling popcorn mountains. This whimsical world turns everyday snacks into epic arenas, blending abstract visuals with a sense of fun and imagination.
Learn how the Artlist team created a series of AI promotional videos, from storyboarding to editing.
Creators using AI tools in filmmaking
AI tools are making it easier than ever for filmmakers to plan and visualize projects with clarity. By generating detailed images with AI prompts, creators can create storyboards without drawing skills. The animate button adds motion to still frames, giving a sense of pacing and camera movement right from the start. This helps pitch ideas to investors with strong visuals that are easy to understand, resulting in a smoother production process.
Youtuber Matt Johnson often uses Artlist AI to help storyboard his client and creative projects. In his AI Filmmaking Tools video, Matt takes his fans through how he builds his storyboards, pitches them with confidence, and turns them into engaging video content.
Instead of starting from scratch, he types a short description in the prompt box to get AI-generated visuals of his ideas. With the help of Artlist’s AI-powered Artboard, Matt pulls this together with relevant music, stock footage, templates, and sound effects. He curates everything into a visual storyboard that helps clients instantly understand the look and feel of the project.
How AI storyboarding helps creators, brands, and agencies
AI-powered tools are designed to support creators — not replace them — by speeding up storyboarding and making it more accessible. They let creative people spend more time on storytelling instead of tedious tasks, helping you and your clients stay focused on what matters: bringing great ideas to life.
Visualize without drawing skills
AI storyboarding lets you create detailed visuals even if you can’t draw. These tools handle the technical work, freeing you to focus on shaping your vision and sharing it clearly. Clients benefit from seeing high-quality visuals early, which helps them more readily buy into the concept.
Pitch ideas with impact
AI-generated images and animated clips help you create professional storyboards that strengthen your pitch. By taking care of technical details, AI tools enable you to craft narratives that win over investors and provide them with a clear, compelling overview of your plan.
Collaborate across languages and cultures
When working with global clients or remote teams, communication can become a barrier. Many AI tools now include translation features and voiceover options in multiple languages, making it easier to share storyboards that everyone can understand, regardless of location or language.
Keep visuals on-brand from the start
Maintaining a consistent look across a storyboard is key to brand recognition. AI makes it simple to apply brand colors, logos, and visual styles throughout your project — ensuring that your presentation is polished, professional, and aligned with your client’s identity from the very beginning.
Simplify client feedback
Clients don’t always have a creative background, which can make feedback vague or unclear. With clear, AI-generated visuals, your ideas become easier to understand, allowing clients to give more focused, helpful input and reducing the number of revisions needed.
Fast, creative, and ready to go with Artlist AI
AI-assisted storyboarding is revolutionizing the way creators, teams, and clients collaborate. It speeds up your workflow, frees you to focus on storytelling, and makes milestone sign-offs easier by giving your clients clear, engaging visuals from the start. Whether you’re a solo filmmaker, part of a remote group, or working at an agency, AI tools help you turn concepts into polished pitches in hours, not weeks.
Start your next storyboard with Artlist’s AI-powered platform and see how inspiring and straightforward pre-production can be. AI isn’t just changing storyboarding; it’s reshaping the entire creative process. Explore Artlist’s AI tools today and unlock new possibilities for your videos and client collaborations.
Did you find this article useful?
