Soku AI1. Describe the product and the angle
Not just what the product is — what the ad is arguing. "Refills cost a third of a new bottle" is an angle; "eco-friendly cleaning spray" is a category. The board is only as good as the claim it is built around.
All tools
Storyboard
Plan the shots before you pay for a single one.
A storyboard is where an ad is won or lost — the order of the shots, where the hook lands, what the first frame says with the sound off. Describe the product and the angle, and get a shot-by-shot board you can direct from, generate against, or hand to an editor.
Shot-by-shotHook in frame one
This tool runs inside Soku, not on this page. Write the brief here — it stays with you through sign-up.
Create a free account and your brief comes with you — it is kept on this page through sign-up, so you are not retyping it afterwards.
Three deliberate steps
2. Get the board, shot by shot
Each shot comes back with its framing, roughly how long it holds, what is on screen and what the viewer is meant to understand by the end of it. The hook is treated as its own shot rather than as a title card bolted onto the front.
3. Direct, generate or hand it over
Use it as a brief for a shoot, generate the shots against it in Soku, or send it to an editor. The board is a working document, not a deliverable that goes in a folder and dies.
Why Soku
Why plan it here
Most storyboard tools stop at the picture. The board is only useful if the thing it describes actually gets made.
The board is an input, not an artifact
Inside Soku the shots it describes are what generation runs against, so the plan and the output do not drift apart. A storyboard that lives in a separate document always ends up describing an ad nobody made.
Written for sound-off viewing
Paid social is watched muted. On-screen text is planned per shot rather than added at the end as a caption, because a hook that only works with audio is not a hook.
Ratios are a planning decision
A 9:16 board and a 1:1 board are not the same board — what fits in frame changes. The plan accounts for where the ad runs instead of assuming it will crop cleanly.
Use cases
Who reaches for this, and when
Performance marketers
Test the angle before the production cost
Three storyboards for three angles costs you an afternoon. Three finished videos costs you a fortnight. Boarding first is how you find out that the angle was the problem, rather than the edit.
Founders without a creative team
Know what to actually film
The hardest part of filming your own ad is not the camera, it is knowing which six shots to get. A board turns "make a video" into a list you can shoot on a phone in an hour.
Agencies and freelancers
Get the client to approve the plan, not the edit
Revisions are cheap on a board and expensive on a cut. Approving shot order and on-screen copy up front is what stops the third round of changes being structural.
Questions before you run it
- Does the storyboard generator run on this page?
- No. This page takes your brief and carries it through sign-up; the storyboard itself is generated inside Soku, against your brand and your credits. We would rather say that plainly than put a Generate button here that only opens a sign-up form.
- What is actually in the storyboard?
- A shot list: each shot with its framing, roughly how long it holds, the on-screen text for that shot, and what the viewer should take away from it. The opening hook is treated as its own shot because it is the shot that decides whether the rest gets watched.
- Do I need to know filmmaking terms to use it?
- No. Describe the product and the argument the ad is making in plain language. The board comes back with the framing decisions made for you, which you can then change.
- Can I generate the actual video from the storyboard?
- Yes, inside Soku. The board is built to be the input to generation rather than a separate document, so the shots it describes are what gets produced. That is the reason to board inside the tool that also makes the ad.
- How is this different from a script?
- A script is what is said; a storyboard is what is seen and in what order. For paid social the second matters more, because most of the audience never turns the sound on. If you want the copy side, the script-to-video tool covers turning ad copy into a shot.
