← How To · Director · 8 min read

How to make an animatic from storyboards

An animatic is a storyboard set to time: each frame held for its real duration, with camera moves, transitions, dialogue and a scratch track, so you can feel the pacing of a scene before a single foot of film is shot. It is the cheapest place to find out a sequence runs long or a cut does not land. In most workflows the animatic lives in a separate app and you re-import frames by hand; in StoryboardCanvas the boards and the animatic share one project file, so the timeline is built from the frames you already drew.

1

Finish the storyboard in /editor

Lay out the sequence in /editor - one frame per beat, with shot type, lens and any camera-move notes in the metadata. The animatic reads this metadata, so the more you fill in now, the less you tune later. Frames generated by the AI Artist or hand-drawn in /draw both carry through.

2

Open /animate and pull in the frames

In /animate, import the board straight from the project - no PNG export, no re-upload. Every frame lands on the timeline in scene order with its source metadata attached, so the cut already reflects the storyboard you approved.

3

Set a duration for every frame

Give each frame the time it should hold on screen. Dialogue frames can take their length from the script's read time; action and establishing frames you set by feel. The running total updates live, so you see the sequence length as you go and catch a scene that runs long immediately.

4

Add camera moves and transitions

Apply a pan, push-in, pull-out or hold from the camera-move presets, and choose how each frame cuts to the next - hard cut, dissolve, fade or wipe. These are the moves that turn a slideshow into something that reads like a scene.

5

Drop a scratch track

Add a scratch voice-over, temp dialogue or a music bed so the timing has something to play against. Pacing that looks fine silent often needs a beat more once there is sound under it; the animatic is where you find that out for free.

6

Export the cut

Render to MP4, MOV or WebM for review, or hand editorial an EDL, XMEML, FCPXML or OpenTimelineIO so the timing you locked carries into the edit. Burn in frame numbers or a subtitle track for notes if the review is remote.

The animatic is the last cheap rehearsal a sequence gets. Because it is built from the same boards in the same project file, a note in the edit becomes a frame change upstream and back down again without anyone re-exporting anything. Pair this with the 'set-up-a-storyboard' and 'generate-ai-storyboards' guides for the full board-to-cut pipeline.

Try it

Open /animate and follow the steps

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