← How To · Director · 12 min read

How to set up a storyboard for a feature

Storyboards used to mean a week of artist contract work. The modern director-led pipeline runs the full screenplay into AI-generated frames in an afternoon, refines the hero shots by hand, and ships a frame-accurate deck the DP and 1st AD can plan against. Here's how.

1

Parse the screenplay into a shotlist

In /shotlist, click Bulk AI parse. Dolly reads the screenplay scene-by-scene and writes one row per shot — shot number, scene heading anchor, type, angle, movement, lens, action beat. The stable UUID scene-ID on each row anchors back to the source screenplay heading so renaming a scene later doesn't break the chain.

2

Refine the shotlist with cinematography fields

Open the DP's view: aperture, shutter, ISO, ND, frame rate, lens length per row. Add notes for filters, slow-motion, or specialty rigs. These fields ride into the storyboard frames so each frame's metadata reflects the camera plan.

3

Generate the storyboard from the shotlist

In /editor, click 'Generate frames from shotlist'. Every shotlist row becomes a frame with the metadata pre-loaded. By default the frames are blank canvases ready for drawing or AI generation.

4

Style-lock an AI artist for the project

Open /ai-artist and pick Mitchell or a custom artist. Run AI Style Sync against your reference bible (see the dedicated how-to for that). The active artist's style now feeds every AI generation across the project — no drift between scenes.

5

Generate frames from the editor

Back in /editor, click any blank frame and pick 'Generate with AI Artist'. The frame's action description seeds the prompt; the project's Live Context (characters in scene, location, props, costumes) automatically attaches as references. Every frame Vision-QA-scored before it lands; below 82/100 auto-retries once.

6

Refine hero frames in Draw

For frames that need handwork — the title card, the climax, the close-up that has to feel exactly right — click Open in Draw. The frame loads into the GPU-accelerated Skia canvas with 1,000+ brushes (charcoal, pencil, marker, ink, watercolour, fountain pen) plus your own Adobe .abr imports. Layers, masks, accumulation buffer, multi-touch tilt — the same drawing engine a professional storyboard artist uses, in the browser.

7

Comment + review with the director and DP

Every frame supports threaded comments. Invite external reviewers (DP, agency, financier) via anonymous share tokens — they review without an account. Approved frames flow into /animate for the timed pass; the editorial team picks up the storyboard + animatic on day one.

An afternoon's work where a week of artist contract used to live. Hero frames still benefit from human touch — but the connective tissue, the 200 frames around them that establish coverage, is the AI-generated work the director can shape in real time.

Try it

Open /editor and follow the steps

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