How to use Storyboards

Storyboards take a written ad brief and surface the clips in your library that fit each section of that ad: hook, problem, demo, CTA, and so on. You provide the brief, Storyboards validates it, runs a semantic search across your existing clips, and returns a draft ad structure with suggested clips for each section.

Head to Clips > Storyboards in your dashboard. The left sidebar lists your clip categories and collections. The main panel shows the brief input at the top and your existing Storyboard projects below.

Click + New Storyboard to open a new project.

The brief text area is the only required input. Type or paste your brief directly into the field. The placeholder text shows a full example of a well-formed brief.

A strong brief should cover five things:

Optionally, use the Reference an existing ad (optional) link at the bottom of the input to attach a reference video. Storyboards uses the AI tags from that video to enrich the brief. It does not copy the clips, slices, or transcript from it.

Once your brief is ready, click Submit.

After you click Submit, Storyboards analyzes your brief. If it is too short or missing key information, you will see a list of errors — each one identifies exactly what is missing and what to add.

Common errors include:

Update your brief to fix the errors and click Submit again.

If your brief passes the initial check but still has room to improve, Storyboards will show a list of suggestions rather than hard errors.

Each suggestion shows the issue and a specific fix. You can either click Run analysis again to resubmit an updated brief, or click Find matching clips to proceed with the current brief.

Once your brief passes, Storyboards processes it in real time. You will see each step complete as it runs:

When all five steps complete, your storyboard results load automatically.

Your storyboard shows each ad section as a numbered row. Each row includes the section name, a one-line description of what that section should capture, and a horizontal strip of matching clips from your library.

The Ad Preview panel on the right plays clips as you select them, so you can quickly assess fit before downloading.

The ad sections Storyboards can use are:

Click any clip thumbnail to preview it in the Ad Preview panel. Click View more at the end of a row to see additional results for that section.

Click Download Clips in the top right to export the full storyboard as a zip file. Inside you will find:

The zip is built the first time you click the button, so a larger storyboard will take a little longer to download the first time.

No. The brief is the only required input. A reference video is optional and only contributes the AI tags Videowise has already generated for that video — Storyboards does not reuse the clips, slices, or transcript from it.

Storyboards searches across the clips already generated in your library. To get better results, make sure your videos are uploaded and your clips have been generated and tagged. See How to write category and tags prompts for Clips for the full setup.

The ad structure is generated from the brief and is not editable section by section. If the structure is not what you wanted, change the brief — for example, spell out the section sequence you want explicitly — and re-run validation.

The most common reason is a vague or missing ad structure. A brief that lists the ad's sequence — for example, Hook → Problem → Solution → CTA — along with clear product and audience details will usually pass. If you see specific errors, address each one before resubmitting.