Shot list
A board a crew can shoot from is written, not drawn.
A generator will give you a beautiful panel from a vague prompt. It will not give you a board a crew can shoot from unless you write in the language a board is written in — framing, camera move and screen direction, stated per shot.
Vocabulary
The four things every panel has to state
Leave any of these to the model and it will choose for you, usually differently each time. That is how a board ends up as eight unrelated pictures of the same story.
-
How close
Wide, medium, close, extreme close. This is the single most load-bearing word in a shot description, and the one most often left out. It sets what the audience can see and therefore what the shot is about.
-
From where
Eye level, low, high, over-the-shoulder. Angle carries most of what a panel says about power and vulnerability, and a model given no angle defaults to a flat eye-level view of everything.
-
Moving how
Static, pan, tilt, push, pull, track. A still panel cannot show movement, so it is written on the slip beneath — which is why a storyboard is a picture plus a caption, not a picture.
-
Facing which way
Screen direction. If a character exits frame right, they should enter the next shot from frame left, or the audience reads it as a change of direction. Models have no idea this rule exists.
The 180-degree rule: draw an imaginary line between two characters in conversation and keep the camera on one side of it. Cross the line and the two appear to swap sides of the screen, which reads as confusion rather than as a new angle. Generators cross it constantly, because each panel is produced without knowledge of the one before. Catching that is a job for whoever assembles the board, and it is the most common defect in a generated one.
Format
What makes a board a working document
Numbered panels
Shots get referred to by number in every conversation that follows. A board whose panels cannot be cited is a gallery.
Aspect ratio matching the deliverable
Board in the ratio you will shoot in. A 1:1 panel tells you nothing useful about what fits in a 2.39:1 frame, and reframing later invalidates the blocking.
Room for notes
Dialogue, duration, sound and action live beneath the panel. The picture alone carries maybe half of what a board communicates.
Reorderable
Boards exist to be rearranged — that is most of their value. A tool that outputs a flat image of a finished grid has removed the function the board was for.
Exportable as one document
A PDF that can be printed, marked up and handed round. Individual image files are a step away from what anyone downstream needs.
House rules
How this will be written
No invented numbers
No scores out of ten, no star ratings, no tier boards. Where something is better, it gets said in words and the reason is shown.
Only claims we can stand behind
Nothing describes a test that did not happen. Pricing and feature claims are checked against the vendor's own pages.
No paid placements
Nothing here is sponsored, and outbound links carry no affiliate tracking and earn no commission. No company pays to be included or to be written about more kindly.
This site is new and there are no tool write-ups on it yet. The panels above are empty frames illustrating the slip format, not generated artwork. When write-ups land they will say which of the format requirements above each tool actually meets.