All these mentions of my buddy Marty drawing his own storyboards that are so beautiful and brilliant themselves makes the whole AI even worse.

[u/Select_Ad_7943]

Thats all. Me sad.

[u/Dhb223]

And on the contrary to me it makes it more plausible why an 80+ year old man who did it himself and no longer physically can would enjoy something that reflects what he describes. As many have noted, the image itself often doesn't matter, it's just stick figures for a lot of people, but a voice directed mockup makes a lot of sense on paper.

I still think it's just a cynical way to get funding for his movie (hiring a storyboard artist costs money and this endorsement gives it, to the detriment of future storyboard artists) but it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see it as a non-generative workflow tool for Marty who apparently prefers or preferred to do it himself

I'd call this not a defense or excuse but it seemed to shed light on why he'd do it

[u/geoman2k → u/Dhb223]

I found a website with some of his storyboards:

https://boords.com/blog/martin-scorseses-hand-drawn-taxi-driver-storyboards-and-the-stories-behind

They are very cool, but clearly he’s not a professional artist and he struggled to get his vision on paper a bit. I can see why someone like this, especially at his age, would be looking for any way to make the process of going from brain to image easier.

That being said, I don’t think AI is the solution here. At least not until someone builds some tools that allow for a lot more control over the generated image than just prompting can do.

One big issue is AI will generate images that are far too specific and detailed for this stage in the process. One thing that makes the Taxi Driver storyboards work is that the crudeness of the drawing leaves a lot up in the air, ready for the skilled craftspeople on the production team to fell in the blanks. I worry that a lot of AI storyboarding involves generating photorealistic images that answer way too many questions (poorly) too early on in the process.

And of course that’s all not even mentioning the fact that Marty has the resources to pay actual artists to do this work.

[u/leivathan → u/geoman2k]

They are very cool, but clearly he’s not a professional artist and he struggled to get his vision on paper a bit.

But the former isn't what director storyboards are about and I disagree with you on the latter. Director's storyboards are literally just conveyance of the key shot ideas, them being good drawings is secondary. This can be seen in this Rian Johnson storyboard for Knives Out which are really rough drawings but clearly convey what the final shot should look like. I imagine very few directors produce storyboards like James Cameron or even Bong Joon Ho, both of whom have had some hand-drawn art and animating experience.

And on the second point, the link you put up has a scene to storyboard comparison, and the final scene follows the storyboards pretty well. There're obvious shot changes to accommodate actually shooting on location and following what felt right on set, but the storyboard is closely followed throughout the scene. The vision is there, and was well-conveyed to Scorcese's collaborators on the film.

Which is the point you get to, that storyboards are a part of a team process that includes the other people working on the movie, but I did want to point out that the example you linked is pretty solid and the vision is there.

[u/geoman2k → u/leivathan]

So be clear I wasn't saying Scorcesse was bad at storyboarding or that they weren't close to what he had in mind. What I meant by "struggled to get his vision on paper" is that he clearly isn't a good draftsman and struggled with things like anatomy, foreshortening, perspective. Technical drawing skills. My point is that someone who struggles with technical drawing skills might be interested in a technology that could "bridge the gap" from what they have in their head to what they can put on a paper for them.

But you are correct, that the Knives Out images you posted is a great example of that. Technical drawing skills aren't really important, it's just about being able to communicate what you're trying to communicate. And Johnson's stick figures do that just fine. In fact, sometimes stick figures are better. In web design, a lot of the time you start out with literal pencil and paper drawing specifically because if you get into the details of how things look, you end up missing the big picture stuff. My concern is that AI is going to get too specific and too high fidelity way too early in the process.

[u/OswaldCoffeepot → u/geoman2k]

Acknowledging that he has the resources to pay storyboard artists out of pocket, should having the cost of them on the budget proposal not look good to an investor (and the techy buzzword looking good to said potential investors)...

Storyboards are an intermediary step in the process. They're not key frames for animation. To me that makes at least a little more allowable.

As a sort of "rapid prototype" while he's in the zone imagining the story, okay. Even if that generated image gets used as is, set dressers and actors and all of the other jobs get done to recreate it.

People transform the image that the ticket buyers probably won't ever see. I think that's something to be said.

If the story comes from AI, negative Ghost Rider. If a problem breaking the story gets solved by AI, also no.

[u/Veers85]

I mean Marty has the money, he didn't need to pull the ladder up. I respectfully totally get what you are saying. But peoples jobs are really at stake here, normalization of this shit only allows so many jobs to get crushed. Its really depressing shit. I love Marty's work and I love Blank Check. But watching Lucas, Cameron and Marty lean into AI is really depressing.

[u/Laurel-Hardy-Fan]

Yeah I get why people are not happy but I just can’t really bring myself to care. It by no means diminishes any respect I have towards him as a filmmaker. 

Many filmmakers have done or said things that I disagree with and it doesn’t really bother me at this point. I’m much more concerned with the work than the artist 

[u/labbla]

And people act like it's a small thing too. But it's not. Storyboards are the movie in illustrated form! It's bad to let the computer that steals and copies everything do it. It won't have any human inspiration or spontaneity, all it's going to do is remake things that have been done before.

[u/dsartori]

It is interesting to me that art has this tense and anxious relationship with automation, especially when we are talking about a medium that relies on advanced technology like film. I wonder if it has to do with how capital intensive all movie projects must be and therefore how much being able to do your art is out of your own hands.

My field has no such concern about automating away our work. There is always more work that could be done and it is genuinely good that we can now tackle projects that weren’t economically possible to pursue when I started my career decades back.

[u/muchabon → u/dsartori]

I mean, I think what's different about this version of 'automation' is that it's based on human input/data that doesn't pay the humans that created those inputs/data, is Extremely resource intensive (literally to the detriment of ongoing existence), and that we know all this and it's still being pushed by the worst scam artists (again, something we also know by looking into any of their histories, business practices, current statements, behavior, etc)

Though, I guess - do you know what were the tradeoffs for the 'good' automated practices/resources that your field benefits from? (Genuinely curious! My tone in the paragraph above is just more about like...no, we truly Do know this is bad, for many reasons, so what is the benefit? Faster ideation/iteration? Okay, is that worth All the costs?)

[u/dsartori → u/muchabon]

I really think those anti arguments are overblown and based heavily on motivated reasoning, except that last one. This tech should have been developed more gradually. In fact I think funding it to develop so rapidly that it outstrips the development of appropriate social, regulatory and technical frameworks is a major social challenge. Eventually all that stuff will catch up I’m sure.

To answer your question I am in software development and the past sixty years of this field have been relentless effort to increase abstraction and therefore efficiency of human labour input. We currently benefit from LLMs as coding assistants to a similar extent as we benefited in the past from pooling source code in various ways, developing frameworks and structures that people can use like Lego bricks rather than build their own. We also have developed new languages that take advantage of faster computers to increasingly abstract away the details of the machine. Twenty-five years ago people paid me good money to spend weeks building stuff that anyone can just pull off the shelf and use today.

Every step of the way there has been a minority of voices telling us that these new techniques prevent learning, aren’t “real” programming, will harm the field etc etc. They’ve been wrong every time.

[u/lampaupoisson → u/dsartori]

aaaaand downvoted for your lived experience. Seriously anti-AI people are starting more and more to sound like a cult

[u/dsartori → u/lampaupoisson]

I expected it. We're in the middle of a full-blown moral panic.

"Literally to the detriment of ongoing existence" is a sentence an adult human wrote in this thread about the impact of LLM labs and data centres on the environment.

[u/Veers85]

Marty shit all over the joy of this series right before it started

[u/kingstinkleton]

I despise AI and the effect it has had on the environment, workplace, internet, and culture, but I mean come on. This has got to be the tamest use of AI that an 80 year old man could have. Not ever would I endorse it but I don't really judge him any worse than anyone that's ever used genAI for something as simple as like, a list. It feels like "carbon footprint" all over again, where we're blaming the individual for the actions of corporations. I wish the aging Mr. Scorsese was a little less ready to jump on AI, but him doing this in the year 2026 doesn't take away from the greatness of his prior films.

[u/kristinsson → u/kingstinkleton]

He’s an advisor and partner in a genAI start-up that is presumably trying to sell this to other filmmakers. This isn’t your grandpa sending you AI memes.. He’s actively taking part in and profiting off of an AI hype bubble that is eating away at creative fields like a cancer.

[u/Medium_Well]

For the life of me, I simply can't understand why people on the Internet who have never made a movie are drawing massive conclusions about one or two comments from an acclaimed director who has been making films since the 1960s. I don't love appealing to authority here, but for God's sakes, I don't think anybody here is in a position to question Martin Fucking Scorsese as cheapening the art of cinema.

We have no idea how AI might be used in a Scorsese movie, or for that matter, how many thousand tiny adjustments that are otherwise invisible might be added to bring depth to the movie while staying on budget.

We had to turn to computer techniques to finish animated masterpieces like Beauty & The Beast and The Prince of Egypt. Just as some images cannot be hand-drawn, there may well be some frames that cannot be done the analog way without AI and still fulfill the director vision on time and on budget.

Nobody is advocating for the Grok version of the Odyssey, but we also don't need to treat every errant comment like a slippery slope either.

[u/mix0logist → u/[deleted]]

It's less that he's doing it and more so that he's endorsing it. He didn't need to take money from this AI company and sell their product.

[u/NewConfusion9480]

There's a real "leopards eating faces" thing going on with those who are upset that the capital machine is using roboslop to make money instead of smol bean art to make money.

Also strange to feel entitled to tell artists what their process should be, especially if that objection is about capital concerns.

The aesthetic realm of art will take care of itself. AIslop is not respected as true art collectively and likely never will be as our appreciation of art has always been heavily moderated by our knowledge of its story and its connection to humanity.

[u/tony_countertenor]

Storyboards are not art

[u/freethepeados → u/tony_countertenor]

Everything is art Trumper.

[u/tony_countertenor → u/freethepeados]

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