Top 5 AI Storyboard Apps: Streamline Your Workflow for Seamless Visualization & Efficient Project Planning
Jourdan Aldredge
Oct 23, 2024
As AI continues to evolve and move into more aspects of film and video content production, it’s important for all of us to remember that the main goal of artificial intelligence is to streamline our productions and make our lives easier.
While the jury might still be out on how helpful AI is today with different elements of live video production and various post-production processes, one area in which AI is already quite capable—and indeed helpful—is the pre-production process.
Most notably, AI is very assistive with concepting and storyboarding. These are some of the earlier iterations of filmmaking and video content production, and many generative AI tools are already available to help creators conceptualize ideas for their projects.
So, if you’re in the early stages of a video project and looking for some tools to help you storyboard your content, here are some of the best AI storyboard apps currently available.
What is storyboarding?
Before we share some of the best storyboard apps and generators for film pros and content creators, let’s take a quick step back and look at what storyboards are. For those perhaps unfamiliar, storyboards are traditionally hand-drawn sketches that outline what shots will be created in the filmmaking process.
The storyboard sketches vary drastically in quality. Some simply stick figures and lines, whereas others are sometimes highly detailed images complete with color, shadows, and other elements.
Storyboards are traditionally done by a film's director or possibly the director of photography to plan out what they want the shots in their project to look like. However, over the years, professional storyboard artists have also emerged who help bring these visions to life with more detail based on a director or filmmaker’s input.
How can AI assist with storyboarding?
As the world saw with the launch of AI models like Runway and DALL-E, one area in which AI has been most impressive here early on is generating images based on text prompts. When you think about it, it is really all storyboarding is.
As one might expect, many AI video editor apps and innovations in this space popped up overnight in the early days of AI.Now that the dust has settled a bit, though, and generative AI innovations have slowed down a bit, it is a good time to look at which AI storyboard generator apps are out there and how well they can perform storyboarding.
We should also mention that there are other tools out there to help content creators prepare for their videos. One helpful new feature is our AI Song Editor which helps filmmakers and video pros start the process of looking for the best royalty free music for their projects right at the start. Once you’ve selected some tracks you like for your video, you can rest assured that with the help of AI you’ll be able to make any song perfectly fit as the soundtrack for your video.
Best AI storyboard apps and generators
Now that we've covered some of the basics of using storyboards in your projects,let’s examine some of the best AI storyboard creator apps and generators available.
The first AI storyboard app we’re going to highlight is exactly what it sounds like: Storyboarder.ai. This AI-powered storyboarder can generate complete storyboards from a simple prompt in a few minutes.
At this point, Storyboarder.ai has been used by some of the most well-known streaming services, acclaimed film productions, and top advertising agencies in the world. It boasts that it has generated over a million images, almost ten thousand concepts crafted, and five thousand scripts processed.
As a cloud-based, AI-powered tool, Storyboarder.ai offers many helpful features, including impressive image-to-image, image-to-video, and animatic capabilities. It is free to try and offers monthly or yearly plans starting at $50 a month for its most basic package.
While apps like Storyboarder.ai might be more flashy and artistic, other storyboarding apps are more traditional and practical. ShotPro HQ feels more like an industry-standard storyboarding tool that helps with all aspects of pre-production.
ShotPro HQ offers compelling pre-visualization options to help filmmakers and content creators design their shots and build their plans into exportable animations. Some other AI-powered and AI-esque features like text-to-speech and 3D characters and objects capable of facial expression animations are neat tricks. Still, overall, the tool feels like playing an advanced version of The Sims.
Dubbed as a “shortcut to effective storyboards,” Boords is a top-rated online storyboarding software that aims to make planning video projects feel fun and not like a job. Like many AI-powered storyboarding apps these days, Boords can work off of a simple text prompt where a user can simply describe the direction of the story and then have an entire script to storyboard AI generated in a matter of seconds.
Boords also offers some innovative AI character guideline features that make it easier to maintain character consistency across your AI-generated storyboard frames. This, honestly, gives Boords a nice step up on its competition, as consistency across frames is a major issue for AI at this current point in time.
Boords also offers some helpful collaborative work features, plus the ability to download and export storyboards as presentation-ready PDFs, PNGs, or even MP4 animatics. Boords is available to try out for free and offers standard plans starting at $44 a month.
A familiar name perhaps to those who have worked in film and video production for the past few years, StudioBinder made its name by offering itself as a one-stop shop for all of a project’s pre-production (and production) needs.
Adding some AI elements, of course, makes sense, and StudioBinder has actually had a pretty solid storyboarding option for several years now. With the StudioBinder online storyboard creator, the tool promises to bring visions to visuals as intuitive storyboard software featured inside one of the world’s leading video, TV, and film production management softwares.
What’s nice about this StudioBinder option is the other tools that go hand-in-hand with the storyboard feature. For example, along with storyboards, you can create mood boards and shotlists and handle almost all of your other pre-production needs.
StudioBinder's online storyboard creator is included in the base subscription model, which starts at $29 a month and includes many of the other helpful StudioBinder features.
For those looking to generate convincing video concepts and storyboards with one of the best AI storyboard generators on the market, Storyboard Hero is another great option. It offers unlimited AI images and promises to drastically reduce the time and cost of storyboard creation.
If you’re tired of spending hours preparing concepts, scripts, and storyboards for your projects and are looking for a one-click solution, Storyboard Hero is focused on AI-powered automation.
The results look on par with some of the better generative AI images you can find online these days, and Storyboard Hero does offer some helpful organization features to help you get the right images in the right places for your projects.
Storyboard Hero offers several different levels of subscription plans, but the lowest level for a solo creator begins at $19 a month.
Ultimately, the choice for the right AI-powered storyboard app is up to you and your unique project needs. For more reasons to use AI audio editor tools, Final Cut Pro AI features or Premiere Pro AI tools for your video content, be sure to stay tuned to the Soundstripe blog.