Storyboarding a 30-Second Ad in Midjourney Before Spending a Dollar on Video
Six frames, one consistent style, zero video generation costs. Midjourney storyboards killed two bad ideas before they became expensive bad ideas.
Before commissioning a 30-second product ad, I now storyboard it in Midjourney, and the practice has already saved me twice from ideas that read well and looked terrible. Six frames, consistent style, maybe an hour of work.
The setup that keeps frames consistent: write one style block (lighting, lens, palette, mood) and reuse it verbatim in every prompt, changing only the scene description. Style references help, but the reusable style block is what stops frame four from looking like a different commercial than frame one.
Frame selection matters more than prompt polish. My six: the problem (person frustrated, product absent), the reveal (product entering frame), the mechanics (close-up doing the thing it does), the transformation (after state, same person, same room as frame one for continuity), a detail hero shot, and the end card composition. If an idea cannot fill those six frames, it does not have thirty seconds in it.
The magic of the storyboard is that it fails cheaply. Ad concept number one looked great in the brief and, in frames, revealed itself as two disconnected scenes and a lot of walking. Killed in an afternoon. In video production, that same discovery happens after the shoot.
The board also becomes the brief. Hand a video editor six approved frames with the style block, and you have specified lighting, composition, and pacing without knowing the vocabulary. Two of my frames needed no changes at all in the final edit; the editor matched them from a single generated image each.