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A storyboard is spatial and an animatic is temporal. The board answers what the shots are, how each is framed, and what happens in what order; it is a page, and you can read it in any direction and take as long as you like on each frame. The animatic answers how long each shot lasts and therefore how the piece feels, which is a completely different question and the one a viewer actually experiences. The practical consequence is that a storyboard can be approved by everyone and still be a third over length, because nobody looking at a page of drawings is counting seconds. That is the single most common reason animatics exist.

Start from the board and add three things. First, a duration per frame, decided by reading the frame and asking honestly how long that shot needs to be legible rather than by dividing the total by the number of shots. Second, the voiceover read at real pace, not skimmed, because a script that looks right on a page is routinely fifteen percent longer spoken. Third, the running total against the target length, which is the number that does the work. If the total is over, cut whole shots rather than shaving frames, since a spot with everything slightly compressed feels rushed while a spot with one fewer idea feels deliberate. Then hand the sequence to whoever assembles the actual video.

No, and it is worth stating plainly. Storyflow is the planning surface: frames in sequence, durations, running total, script mapped against the picture, and reference beside each frame. It does not play the sequence back as video, mix audio, or export a rendered file. Boords does animatic playback and does it well, and a real animatic with a mixed scratch track is normally assembled in an edit application. What Storyflow gives you is the part before that, which is where the timing decisions actually get made, and it keeps that work on the same canvas as the moodboard, the shot list, and the schedule rather than in a dedicated tool that covers one step.

Not during early access. Storyflow is paid-only right now, with plans from $7.99 a month billed annually, and a Free plan launches before the end of 2026. Anyone a paid member invites to a board joins free today, so a client or an editor can view and comment without paying. If you need a free option this minute, any video editor with a free tier will let you assemble stills with durations, which is a genuine animatic, and Boords has a free tier for smaller projects. For the planning half, a numbered list of shots with a seconds column in a spreadsheet does the arithmetic perfectly well, and it is worth doing even if you do nothing else.

After the board is agreed and before anything is booked, which in practice means before the shoot in live action and before any animation begins. The reason is purely economic: at animatic stage a shot costs nothing to cut, at shoot stage it costs a setup, and in animation it costs weeks. Making it earlier than board approval is usually wasted, because the shots are still moving. Making it later than a booking is common and mostly useless, since discovering an over-length once a crew is confirmed converts a creative decision into a budget conversation. For animation specifically, treat it as the actual gate: nothing goes into production until the animatic locks.

As long as it takes to read, and that varies far more than people expect. A close-up of a face reacting can play in under a second because the viewer already has the context. A wide establishing shot of an unfamiliar location needs three or four seconds before anyone has taken it in, and it is the shot most consistently under-timed on paper. Text on screen needs enough time to be read at a slow reading pace, not yours. The practical method is to read the frame aloud describing what a viewer has to understand from it and time yourself, which is crude and much closer than guessing. Then check the total, because the fix for over-length is cutting shots, not shortening all of them.

Yes, and it is worth doing at the same time rather than later. A sixty second hero cut, a thirty, a fifteen for social, and a six second bumper are not trims of each other; each is a different argument that happens to share footage, and treating the short ones as trims is why they usually feel like something is missing. On a canvas, lay each version as its own row of frames and mark which shots they share, which immediately shows you the shots every version needs, meaning those are the ones that must be perfect on the day. It also tells the shoot something useful, because a shot required only by the six second version still has to be captured.

Yes, and getting timing approved rather than just pictures is the point. Send a view-only link and a client opens the sequence with the durations visible in a browser with no account, which turns a vague approval of a board into a specific agreement about what fits. Comments attach to the frame they concern, so a note about the end card sits on the end card rather than in a list of eight points. This matters most in the conversation about cutting, because a client looking at a running total that exceeds the slot is having a different conversation from one being told that something has to go.

Directly, if the planning stays on one canvas. The frames become the shot list, since they are already in order with their framing described. The durations inform the schedule, because a setup's complexity and how many seconds it yields together tell you what the day realistically holds, and the shots that survived the animatic are the ones that must not be dropped when the day runs late. The reference pinned to each frame goes to the camera and art departments as it is. The alternative, which is the normal arrangement, is a board in one file, a shot list retyped in another, and a schedule built from a third, with the timing decisions that justified all three left behind in the animatic.