Building a storyboard

A storyboard is generated by the AI, not assembled by hand. You describe the story you want to tell; the AI writes the slides, the widgets that appear on each one, and the narration that drives them. An untouched storyboard document shows "AI has not generated storyboard content yet" until you ask for something.

How slides come to be

Each slide is a list of operations. Playing the slide runs them in order: create this chart here, move that one, annotate this bar, fade the rest. There is no separate canvas document that slides point at — the widgets you see are what the slide's operations built.

A later slide can reuse a widget an earlier slide created, so a chart can persist across several slides instead of being rebuilt each time. That dependency is also why reordering is not always free: if a move would put a slide before the one that creates the widget it reuses, the move is rejected with a dialog explaining which slides depend on which.

What you can adjust

Theme and light / dark mode

Pick the theme under Appearance in the Canvas group of the Property panel. It is saved in the document and travels with the file, so collaborators and viewers all see the same theme. Every theme has a light and a dark variant: viewers in light mode see the light one, viewers in dark mode see the dark one — so a storyboard needs to look right in both.

• Background colour: the top of the colour picker lists the theme's colours; pick one and the background follows the theme and the mode. The bottom is a custom colour, which stays fixed. New storyboards use the theme's background colour.
• Colours inside widgets: text, curve and data-item colours can be theme colours too — the Property panel and the data editor use the same colour picker, with the theme colours at the top. A theme colour follows the theme and the mode; a custom colour is the same in both, so make sure it reads in both. The built-in widgets' default colours read in both modes.
• Contrast hint: when background and text are too close in contrast in either variant, the panel says which one, without changing anything for you.
• Preview the other mode: switches only your own view between light and dark to check the other variant; nothing is saved.

Page transitions

Turning to the next page plays a short transition between the old page and the new one. You can change it in two places in the Property panel:

• Page Transition (document settings): the default for the whole document — Fade, Slide, Wipe, Zoom or None (cut), lasting 200–1500 ms. If you never set it, it is a 400 ms fade.
• Transition Into This Page (current page settings): changes only the transition into this page, useful for a cover or a section page; it defaults to Follow document.

A few rules:

• When you go back a page, Slide and Wipe run in the opposite direction.
• Jumping to a distant page from the outline or the transcript always fades — a slide would suggest the page next door.
• When a widget from the previous page carries on into this one (reused at the start of the narration without a new entrance), the transition is always a fade, and the widget glides from its old place to its new one.
• Switching pages while editing and dragging the progress bar have no transition. If your system has "reduce motion" on, every transition becomes a fade.
• Narration starts once the transition ends, so each page gets longer by the transition's duration.

Recommended workflow

1. Describe the story: tell the AI what you want to present and what data it should draw on.
2. Read the outline: check that the slide order matches the argument you want to make; drag to reorder where it doesn't.
3. Refine in place: fix wording, data, and layout on the widgets themselves; use the Property panel for slide-level settings like background and pinned elements.
4. Run it once: play through the whole flow to catch missing pieces.

Editing and presenting

A storyboard is edited and presented on the same canvas:

• Modify widget content directly on the canvas;
• Press Space (or the play button below the canvas) to play it with narration;
• Press F to enter Fullscreen playback.

Next step

• Captions & narration cues
• Fullscreen playback