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How to make an animatic in M Studio

Most animatic workflows force you through five tools: a storyboard app, an image editor, a video editor, a voice recorder, and a music library. M Studio compresses all five into one timeline.

• 1. Start from script or existing storyboard — Paste a script to auto-generate storyboard frames, or import frames you've drawn. Every frame becomes an animatic timeline clip.
• 2. Set per-frame timing — Drag frame edges to extend or shorten. Standard starting points: 2–4 seconds for dialogue close-ups, 1–3 seconds for action, 3–5 for establishing wides. Adjust from there.
• 3. Layer voice, music, and SFX — Generate AI voiceover from your script, pick a music track or generate one from a mood prompt, and drop in sound effects. Multi-track audio arranged on the same timeline as your visuals.
• 4. Review, adjust, export — Play it back, make timing fixes where the cut drags, share a review link with the director or client, and export MP4 when approved.

Who uses an animatic maker

• Directors planning scene rhythm — Use animatics to review pacing, transitions, and emotional beats before cameras, actors, or expensive post resources are involved.
• Agencies presenting campaign sequences to clients — An animatic sells a concept in a way a storyboard alone can't. Clients see timing and mood — and sign off on what they'll actually get.
• Animation studios validating storyboards — 2D, 3D, and stop-motion studios run animatics as a required stage before animators spend weeks on a sequence. Pixar makes them. DreamWorks makes them. Ghibli makes them.
• Indie creators and solo filmmakers — Short-film directors, music-video directors, and content creators use animatics to test sequences before shooting or committing to full AI video generation.

How M Studio compares to other animatic makers

If you've been using Boords, Krock, LTX Studio, Storyboard Pro, or assembling animatics in Premiere / Final Cut, here's where M Studio fits. Short version: traditional tools assume you already have the frames — M Studio generates them.

• vs Boords — Boords is strong at collaborative storyboarding and review, and now offers AI frames and animatics too. M Studio's difference is the chain after the board: the same project plans shots from your script, times them, and turns approved frames into video clips. Boords suits illustrated boards with heavy client review; M Studio suits script-to-animatic-to-video work.
• vs Toon Boom Storyboard Pro — Storyboard Pro is the animation-industry standard for professional animatic pipelines. It's also $25+/month, desktop-only, and designed for trained storyboard artists. M Studio is browser-based and AI-assisted — built for directors and producers who need animatics fast without a dedicated storyboard artist.
• vs LTX Studio — LTX Studio focuses on AI video generation with animatic-adjacent workflows. M Studio is more tightly integrated with the storyboard → animatic → animation pipeline, keeping storyboard frames as the canonical source that the animatic and final video both inherit from.
• vs krock.io — Krock is a solid lightweight animatic tool but limited on AI generation and production-stage handoff. M Studio replaces both the animatic step and the downstream motion/export workflow in a single project.
• vs Premiere / Final Cut — Traditional editors can assemble animatics — many crews do this today. The penalty is manual work on every iteration: re-importing frames, realigning audio, re-exporting. M Studio removes that friction when the animatic is inherently derived from an already-existing storyboard.