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AI Video & Storyboard Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms behind AI video and storyboard generation — from storyboard and shot list to the generation modes (t2v, i2v, r2v) you will meet in any modern tool.

Storyboarding & pre-production

Storyboard: A sequenced set of shots — each shown as a frame or description with framing and action — that lets you see a film before you shoot it. In AI workflows, each panel often carries the prompt that will generate it.
Shot list: A structured, text breakdown of every shot in a scene: shot number, type (wide / medium / close-up), camera angle, movement, subject, and duration. The shot list is the spreadsheet version of a storyboard.
Animatic: A timed slideshow of storyboard frames, often with scratch audio, used to test pacing before any footage exists. An animatic is a presentation of stills — not generated video.
Logline: A single sentence that captures a story: protagonist, goal, obstacle, and stakes. It is the brief that every later creative decision is judged against.
Treatment: A short prose summary of the whole story — usually one to two pages, no dialogue — written before the screenplay so structural problems can be fixed cheaply.
Screenplay: The formatted script of a film: scene headings, action, and dialogue. In an AI storyboard workflow, the screenplay is locked first, then broken into shots.
Establishing shot: A wide shot, usually opening a scene, that sets the location and spatial geography so the audience knows where they are before the action tightens in.
Cut: The transition from one shot to the next. Planning the cut between shots is what makes a storyboard read as continuous motion rather than a gallery of separate images.

AI generation modes

Text-to-video (t2v): Generating a video clip directly from a text prompt, with no input image.
Image-to-video (i2v): Animating a still image: you supply a starting frame and the model generates motion from it.
Reference-to-video (r2v): Generating video from one or more reference images that define a character, style, or subject — without designating a strict first frame.
First-last-frame (firstlast): Supplying both a starting and an ending image; the model generates the in-between motion that connects them.
Text-to-image (t2i): Generating a still image from a text prompt.
Image-to-image (i2i): Editing or restyling an existing image with a prompt while preserving its core content — used for outfit swaps, expression changes, and reference cleanup.

AI video concepts

Character consistency: Keeping a character looking like the same person — face, outfit, build — across multiple shots and generations, by binding identity reference images and a persona to a reusable character rather than re-describing it in each prompt.
Video prompt: The structured description sent to a video model for one shot — typically a first frame, the motion through the shot, and where it lands — plus any reference images and style.
Multi-model platform: A platform that gives access to many AI models (e.g. Sora 2, Kling, Seedance, VEO) from one account, so you can route each shot to the model that suits it instead of being locked to one engine.
Frame chaining: Using the last frame of one shot as the first frame of the next, so a continuous action stays coherent across a cut.

Ready to put these into practice?

AI storyboard generator How to turn a script into a storyboard