Cineboard — User Guide

Everything you need to know about planning a storyboard, generating panel art, and producing a printable shooting board.

What is Cineboard?

Cineboard is a collaborative storyboard studio. You plan your film, episode or short as a sequence of scenes containing panels (shots). For each panel you can:

• Write the action beat, dialogue and production notes.
• Assign characters from a reusable cast list and a location from a reusable location list — this keeps looks consistent across all panels they appear in.
• Pick the camera framing and shot type, with tag translation handled automatically.
• Generate an illustrated frame using AI and iterate on it with locked or free seeds.

Work is saved automatically. When you're done, you can play the panels as a slideshow with dialogue subtitles, or print a full shooting-board PDF with a cover sheet, per-scene panels, a cast reference sheet and a locations sheet.

First-time setup

The first time Cineboard is launched, the signup screen becomes a one-time administrator setup. The very first account created becomes the site administrator and is automatically assigned to a new team (studio).

1. Open the app. You will see the "Create admin account" screen.
2. Enter your email address (this will be your username), a password (minimum 6 characters), and optionally name your team / studio.
3. Click Create admin account.

After this, ordinary signup is disabled. New users can only be added by an administrator or by a team admin. See Team members.

Signing in

Sign in with the email and password assigned to you. If you don't have an account, ask your team admin to create one for you.

Screen layout

The app has four main regions:

Board / Timeline / Outline

Three views show the same panels in different formats. All three support selecting, editing, double-clicking to open the image, right-click context menus, drag-and-drop reordering, inline scene rename and "add panel" buttons.

Board

Grid of panel cards grouped by scene. Best for a global overview. Drag cards between or within scenes to reorder.

Timeline

Horizontal scrolling lane per scene, each card showing its duration at the bottom. Scene headers show total scene runtime. Use this to plan pacing.

Outline

Script-like vertical layout with each panel's action beat, dialogue (speaker-formatted), prompt and notes. Best for script reviews with the writer role.

Themes

The user menu ( top right) contains a Theme selector. Themes are CSS files dropped into the themes/ folder. Your choice is saved locally per browser.

Projects

A project (a.k.a. storyboard) holds scenes, panels, characters, locations and settings. You can have any number of projects per team.

Creating & opening

• Click the button at the top of the Projects sidebar.
• Click any project in the sidebar to open it. The URL updates so you can bookmark or share a link.

Renaming

Click the title field in the header and type. Changes auto-save after a short delay. The save indicator () turns into a spinner during save.

Duplicating, exporting, deleting

Right-click a project in the sidebar for Duplicate (makes a full copy including images), Export (downloads a self-contained JSON), or Delete (irreversible).

Project settings

The button in the header opens Project settings where you can change:

• Title and free-form description (your own reference — not sent to the AI).
• Aspect ratio — resolution used for every panel image.
• Quality — sampler steps (Draft 8 → Maximum 30). Higher = slower but sharper.
• Default rating — the safety tag prepended to prompts.

Scenes

Scenes group your panels. A new project starts with Scene 1. To create more, click next to Scenes in the sidebar.

• Rename: click the scene title in the Board / Timeline / Outline to edit it in place (press Enter or click away to confirm).
• Delete: right-click a scene in the sidebar or its title on the canvas. Panels from the deleted scene are moved to the first remaining scene.
• Move panels between scenes: drag-and-drop, or change the Scene dropdown in the inspector.

Panels

A panel is one shot. Create panels with the Add panel buttons inside each scene (visible in all three views) or by right-clicking an existing panel and choosing Duplicate.

Reordering

Drag any panel card with your mouse. Drop it on another card to insert before it, or on the "Add panel" button of any scene to drop it at the end of that scene. You can drag across scenes to re-assign.

Selecting

Single-click a panel to select it and open the inspector. Double-click the panel's image to open the full-screen lightbox.

Context menu

Right-click any panel for: Generate image, View image, Edit, Duplicate and Delete (subject to your permissions).

Panel inspector

The right-side inspector lets you fine-tune one panel. Every field has a tooltip — hover it for an explanation. Key fields:

• Title — your own label (not sent to the AI).
• Scene / Location — which scene this belongs to and which pre-built location sets the background.
• Cast in this panel — click character chips to include them. Their description is automatically injected into every panel they appear in, keeping them visually consistent.
• Action beat — what happens in this shot. Folded into the prompt as a descriptive clause.
• Dialogue — one line per character. Use NAME: line to get speaker-formatted output in the slideshow and printed board.
• Notes — director / continuity notes. Shown on cards and the printed board but never sent to the AI.
• Additional tags — extra comma-separated tags appended to the prompt. Prefix with - to make a tag negative, e.g. beach, sunset, -blurry.
• Extra negative — tags to explicitly suppress for this panel only.
• Camera / Shot type — translated automatically to image tags (e.g. wide → wide shot, full body).
• Duration (s) — estimated screen time. Used by the Timeline view and by the slideshow pacing.
• Rating — safety tag prepended to the positive prompt.
• Seed — blank for random, or set a number for reproducibility. See Seeds.

Characters (cast)

The Cast tab in the sidebar manages reusable characters. Reusing a character across panels is how Cineboard keeps their appearance consistent.

Creating

1. Go to the Cast tab, click .
2. Give the character a name and use the Quick builder dropdowns (gender, ethnicity, hair, body, etc.) to set basics.
3. Free-type anything extra in the Description field (e.g. freckles, scar over left eye).
4. Put what they wear in the separate Wearing / outfit field — that way you can iterate on costumes without rewriting the body description.
5. Optionally add Negative tags (things to suppress), a Seed (to pin a specific look) and free-form Notes.
6. Click Generate to produce a reference portrait.

Trigger tag

Optional short alias (e.g. alice) for your own notes. The AI actually sees the full description — the trigger is just a human reminder.

Age

The Age field adds the token 22yo (or similar) to the description.

Locations (places)

Similar to characters but for backgrounds and settings. Assign a location to a panel in the inspector; its description is prepended to the prompt.

• Description: architecture, weather, time of day, landmarks — e.g. coastal town, narrow cobblestone streets, overcast sky, distant lighthouse.
• Negative tags: things that should never appear here (e.g. modern, cars).
• Seed / Notes work the same as for characters.
• Click Generate to produce a reference image of the setting.

How generation works

When you generate a panel, Cineboard assembles a prompt like this:

1. Quality prefix — built-in quality tags.
2. Safety tag — from the panel's content rating.
3. Camera / shot tags — translated from your selections.
4. Location description — if a location is assigned.
5. Character descriptions — body + clothing for every character chip active on the panel.
6. Your additional tags — the panel's free-text Additional tags.
7. Action beat — as a descriptive clause.

Negatives are assembled similarly, combining the built-in safety list, each character's negative tags, the location's negative tags and the panel's extra negatives.

Generation is queued on the server. The panel card shows a spinner while processing; it will update automatically when ready. Errors bubble up as toast notifications.

Seeds & reproducibility

Every panel / character / location has an optional seed. The seed determines the random sampling path taken by the model.

• Blank seed: server picks a fresh random seed on every generation. You get a different image each time.
• Explicit seed (typed in): same seed + same prompt → identical output. Useful for small iterations.
• 🔒 Lock: on a panel, click the lock icon next to the seed input to remember the last used random seed. After the next generation, the seed field will be filled with the number that was just used, so regenerating with a tweaked prompt gives a comparable image. Click the dice icon to clear it again.

Quality & aspect ratio

Set both in Project settings:

• Draft (8 steps) — fast, lower quality. Great for roughing out a board.
• Standard (16 steps) — balanced.
• High (24 steps) — detailed, slower.
• Maximum (30 steps) — sharpest. Slow.

Aspect ratios cover common cinematic and vertical formats (16:9, 2.40:1, 4:3, 1:1 and 9:16).

Lightbox viewer

Double-click any panel image (in any view) or a character / location reference to open the full-screen lightbox. Click outside the image or press Esc to close.

Slideshow playback

Click the icon in the header to play your panels as a slideshow with the scene title, panel number, per-panel timing, and dialogue subtitles rendered as speaker-formatted lines.

• Frame duration: defaults to Auto — each panel shows for its own Duration. Override with 1 – 10 seconds from the control bar.
• Controls: previous / play-pause / next buttons and a progress bar.
• Keyboard: Space = play/pause, ← / → = prev / next, Esc = close.

Printable shooting board

Click the icon in the header. A print-optimised window opens and sends itself to the print dialog (save as PDF from there). The document contains:

1. Cover page — title, description, scene/panel counts, estimated runtime (formatted as 1h 12m 30s, 2m 45s or 12.3s depending on length).
2. One page per scene — every panel with its image, title, camera/shot/duration chips, action beat, dialogue (formatted with speaker headers), notes and prompt.
3. Cast reference sheet — for every character: their reference portrait, name, trigger tag, a structured attributes list (Attribute: value for gender, ethnicity, hair, etc.), outfit, full description and notes.
4. Locations sheet — every location's reference image, name, description and notes.

Import & export

Every project can be exported as a self-contained JSON file with images base64-embedded — perfect for backups or moving between servers.

• Export: click the icon in the header, or right-click a project in the sidebar → Export.
• Import: user menu → Import project, then pick the exported .cineboard.json file. A brand-new project is created in your current team — it won't overwrite anything.

Team members

Team admins can manage other users in the same team via the user menu → Team members. From there:

• Rename the team and edit its description.
• Add new members (email + initial password + role).
• Change someone's role from the dropdown.
• Reset another member's password.
• Delete a member (they are immediately signed out everywhere).

Roles & permissions

Every team member has one role. The role decides what they can do inside the team.

Your account

User menu → Edit account lets you change your own password. The email (username) cannot be changed — ask an admin if it must be updated.

Keyboard shortcuts

Global

Inline editing

Lightbox

Slideshow

Mouse

Tips & tricks

• Build cast & locations first. Every panel where you assign those chips gets a consistent look automatically. Iterating on a character's outfit later only needs editing the Wearing field.
• Use trigger tags as labels for your own notes — they are not actually sent to the model.
• Rough the whole story on Draft quality first, then switch to Standard / High for the panels that matter. It's much faster.
• Pin a seed before committing to a character. Small prompt tweaks with a locked seed produce subtly different variations rather than completely new faces.
• Use the Timeline to balance pacing. Short panels in a row feel snappy; long ones feel contemplative.
• The Outline view is best for writers — give teammates the writer role and they'll see only the script fields.
• Prefix tags with - in Additional tags to demote them to negatives without switching fields.
• Print to PDF and share with your crew — the shooting board includes the cast / location reference sheets, which doubles as a lookbook.