Storyboarding with AI

Hello Artistic Alchemists.

If you work with films, animations, motion graphics or any other type of moving images, you have met yourself with a storyboard.

Storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of images displayed in a sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing your project.

It’s extremely useful to see how your visual story will flow and look like, before you actually go and make the thing.

AI can make this process of visualization quicker and easier and I want to share the process I use to make storyboards.

First comes CONCEPTING.

We can use AI to visualize the concepts and scene we have in mind.

I want to see a high tech fantasy city running on magical crystals. I will add one of my style templates to it to create an atmosphere for the world.

The prompt becomes:

a high tech fantasy city running on magical crystals ::3 arcane, into the spider verse ::1 high contrast colors, saturated colors, blue split-complementary colors ::1 strong brush strokes, defined brush strokes, detailed brush strokes, hand drawn, emphasis lines ::1.5 chromatic aberration, cel shading, dotted shading ::1.5 extra wide angle shot ::1 —ar 2:1

Once I have this, I convert it into Line art, which is primarily used in storyboards.

You might ask yourself, why wouldn’t I create the storyboard with colors and full design.

I asked myself the same question. And the answer is control.

The thing we’re all trying to achieve with AI is control. Control over how the outcome will look like and how we can consistently replicate it. At the moment the control is lacking. And removing or adding an element to an image is easier done by hand than it is with AI.

That is why AI can support our creative workflow and not replace it.

So, if I make an image and later want to adjust it, having more details will make doing it by hand more difficult. The reason Line art is used in storyboarding is because it has no color, no shading and no fine details. Only lines that represent the essential shapes in the image.

To convert the image above into line art, I will use it as an Image prompt in a prompt template I created for line art. I will also add the original prompt subject to it.

Image link a hand drawn sketch of a high tech fantasy city running on magical crystals, simple line art, flat art, minimalistic, a comic book panel, thumbnail, low res --no shading, color --niji

There will be slight variations in the image, but overall the composition and shapes will remain intact.

Manual work and redrawing is still necessary, but this saves A LOT of time when you want to quickly visualize your story with a storyboard, as you don’t have to draw everything.

As always, reach out through my website or any of my social media and start a conversation! I would love to hear how you use this technique to support your own creative process.

Keep creating and don't forget to have fun. ☀️