Are AI Storyboards Changing How Ideas Get Approved?
AI storyboards have quietly changed the most consequential meeting in advertising. A board used to be deliberately unfinished, and that roughness was doing work nobody wrote down.
A pencil frame forced the client to imagine the film. Imagination is generous, and it left room for the director to bring something the board never contained. That gap was where a lot of the best work happened.
What AI Storyboards Remove
The gap. A rendered frame does not invite imagination, it invites reaction, and a client reacting to a specific image is evaluating that image rather than the idea underneath it.
The predictable consequence is that ideas which look good as still frames now beat ideas that only work in motion. Those are not the same set, and the difference is not in the brief's favour.
The Second Effect, On The Shoot
A photorealistic board sets an expectation the film is then measured against. Directors report being asked why a shot does not match the board, which inverts the relationship: the board was supposed to be a proposal, not a specification.
A rough board is a question. A rendered board is a promise, and somebody has to keep it.
What Good Teams Are Doing
Some have gone back to presenting deliberately rough, which is a hard sell when the client knows better-looking boards are a prompt away.
The more workable version is to render selectively, showing finish where finish is the point and staying loose everywhere else. That takes a decision per frame, which is more effort than generating all of them and is the whole of the discipline. It also has to be explained to the client, because a deliberately rough frame now reads as one somebody could not be bothered to finish. See also how agencies are presenting ideas now.
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