The board wins the job before the shoot ever happens
Commercial production inverts the usual weight. The shoot is a day, maybe two. The work that decides whether you get paid happens before it, in the treatment and the boards that a client and an agency sign off on — and again after it, in a post schedule measured in days.
That front end is where small production companies lose. Pitching against a shop with an in-house art department means the other treatment looks like a film and yours looks like a document, and the idea rarely survives the difference.
Boards and concept art generated from the treatment change that arithmetic. Not because generated frames beat a good illustrator — they do not — but because they let a three-person company put something visual in front of a client on the timeline a pitch actually runs on.
Pitch, approve, shoot
Weighted towards the front end, because that is where a commercial is won or lost.
- 01Treatment and concept
Look, tone and reference in a form a client can react to, rather than three paragraphs and a mood board of other people's work.
- 02Storyboards
Frame by frame from the script, which for a 30-second spot is the deliverable the client is actually approving.
- 03Animatic
Boards cut to time. A spot that runs eight seconds long is a problem you want to find in the animatic, not in the online.
- 04Shot list and schedule
A commercial day is measured in setups, not pages — the shot list is the schedule, and setup count is the whole constraint.
- 05Budget
Costed from the same shot list and crew, in your own currency across 110 supported.
Setups, not pages
Feature scheduling thinks in pages per day. A commercial does not: a 30-second spot might be four pages of nothing and eighteen setups, and it is the setup count that decides whether the day finishes.
Planning from the shot list rather than the script page is the correct unit here, and it is also what makes an overrun visible on paper. Eighteen setups in a ten-hour day with a company move is not an opinion — it is arithmetic somebody should do before the client is standing on set.
What a commercial shop should know we do not have
No client review and approval workflow. Versioned boards with client comments, approval states and sign-off tracking is how agency work actually moves, and we do not model it — boards export as PDFs you send.
No media asset management or brand asset library either, which matters for a shop running the same client across many spots.
And no per-client or per-job reporting layer. Projects are independent, so a company producing forty spots a year is managing forty projects rather than a client roster.
Common questions
Is this useful for a one-day shoot?
The shoot planning is light for a single day; the pre-production is where the value sits. Boards, animatic and a setup-driven shot list are the parts commercial producers use most.
Can I show a client the boards?
You can export them as PDFs and send them. What we do not have is an approval workflow — versioned review, client comments and sign-off states are a real gap for agency work, and worth knowing before you build a pitch process around this.
Do animatics have sound?
Animatics are boards cut to timing so you can see the spot's actual duration. Treat them as a timing and structure check rather than a finished pre-vis with a mixed track.
Is there per-project pricing?
No. Credits are consumed when you generate, and there is no per-project or per-seat fee — which suits a shop pitching often and shooting some of what it pitches.
Can I reuse a treatment across pitches?
Projects are independent, so there is no shared brand asset library to draw from. For a company running the same client repeatedly that is a limitation rather than a preference.
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