Storyboarding Easy Mastery with ChatGPT and Midjourney

Even if you have been using Storyboarding extensively before, and definitely if you haven't, in the lesson I show you how to get ChatGPT to suggest and elaborate on many use cases and applications for storyboarding, and offer general structure to your storyboards. Try out the things in this lesson to open your mind to more possibilities for storyboards.

A list of ChatGPT prompts used in the lesson for you to reuse is available as a resource in this lesson.

Creating an effective storyboard starts with a good story. I'll show you how to use ChatGPT to help you think about and add detials about you characters or personas, their actions, the environment where things are happening, and an engaging plot. ChatGPT will add details that will serve as a brief document for the visual artist - whether it will be yourself using MidJourney, another team member doing so, or even if you will prefer to use a human sketch artist to actually do the visuals.

Story archetypes are a powerful way for us to stand on the shoulders of the best storytellers in history. In this lesson how show you how to use story archetypes and patterns in the context of storyboarding. I share two main approaches - first, how ChatGPT can help you discover and then apply common story flow patterns in your storyboard use cases, and second - how to train ChatGPT to use templates or patterns that you have seen to be successful in the past, and establish your own storyboard archetypes that ChatGPT can use moving forward.

As we get closer to producing the storyboard images with the help of MidJourney, in this lesson I cover the structure of great prompts to help us create the storyboard scenes. You should be thinking about this recommended structure when writing or tweaking your prompts by yourself, and we will soon train ChatGPT to follow the same structure so we can semi-automate the MidJourney prompt writing process.

Now that we know the recommended structure for a storyboarding prompt for MidJourney, we can train ChatGPT to write prompts for us. In fact, in this lesson I show you how to have ChatGPT ask you all it needs to know in order to build those MidJourney prompts for you.

Consistent characters are a key part of storyboards. In this lesson, I share with you the best way to create such characters in MidJourney. Create character sheets, do some basic editing outside of MidJourney, and then upload the images back to MidJourney to serve as reference images for future scenes. I show you how to create the same image with different clothing, have it appear in different environments, and performing different actions. It's not as straightforward and not as easy as it sounds, but I show how it can be done.

To make things easier and faster for you, especially when trying to create consistent characters, I created a bunch of character sheets and character variations for them. In this lesson I show you what you get, and share this resource so you can download it.

In this section I show you a variety of use cases and domains to the storyboarding machine we have built in this course can be applied to. Watch this short intro to get an idea of what we aim to achieve in this section.

Compliance training is one of the common cases we all need to go through in the workplace. For instructional designers, it's always a challenge how to get your audience to go through the required content, while keep them engaged. This could be related to safety training, data privacy, information security, and many other topics. In this lesson I show you the end-to-end process of creating a creative and effective compliance training with a storyboard. The topic of the example is harassment at work, but you can apply it to other topics. You'll see how to brainstorm the story type and structure with ChatGPT, get ChatGPT to help you writing the prompts for MidJourney, create eye-catching scenes with MidJourney, and finally - putting it all together to have a storyboard with images and text quickly created by your AI co-creators. The style I use in this example is photo-realistic horror movie...

Here we will go through an example of creating a storyboard for a social media campaign for LinkedIn or Instagram. ChatGPT will help us write the story for the campaign, as well as the marketing messages to go along with the images, and will prepare our initial MidJourney prompts. Then we can use those to create the images in MidJourney. The style I use in this example is comic style.

In this use case I show you how I create a story idea and a storyboard for the concept of a new product. I use ChatGPT to even help come up with the product idea, then write the story flow and scene descriptions for me. The next step involves the interaction between ChatGPT, MidJourney, and myself in generating and refining the prompts needed to achieve the visual scenes to go with my story. I share also some tips and tricks on how to maintain character consistency in the process. The style I use in this example is cinematic still frame.

MidJourney has release a new feature that allows us to edit and change parts of an image we already created. This gives us extra flexibility in achieving the right results in our storyboard images. Check out this lesson to learn how to use this feature.

In October 2023 OpenAI rolled out a new feature for ChatGPT that makes visual storyboarding with ChatGPT so much simpler. In fact, you don't need to use a different application such as MidJourney to create the images like we did in part of this course, as now OpenAI's own image generation tool is integrated into ChatGPT.

Following a question from a student, I dive deeper in this lesson on how to create consistent characters in different scenes with a variety of facial and emotional expression, and with different people, objects, and surrounding included in the scenes.

I use a combination of Vary (Region), Panning, and Zooming out to get this done in MidJourney.