Hello everyone,
I've been exploring Leonardo AI for the past few months, primarily within the context of a digital transformation project for a client in the media space. While many discussions here focus on single stunning images or character design, I'm particularly interested in its application for *sequential* creative work—specifically, storyboarding for short-form video and internal explainer content.
Our team is evaluating cost-effective SaaS solutions that can maintain character consistency, scene coherence, and a reasonable stylistic thread across a sequence of 10-20 panels. Leonardo's AI Canvas and real-time generation features seem promising, but the jump from generating one great image to producing a usable storyboard is significant.
I'd love to hear from others who are using it in a similar, production-oriented workflow. My main queries are around practical tips and pitfalls:
* **Character Consistency:** What's your most reliable method? Are you fine-tuning a model on a specific character, relying heavily on image-to-image with a strong base image, or using the Alchemy/Photoreal settings in a specific way? I've had mixed results with the "Remix" feature for this.
* **Scene & Style Cohesion:** How do you handle maintaining a uniform lighting style, color palette, and artistic feel across different panels that may require wide shots, close-ups, and different settings?
* **Asset Management:** Do you find yourself using the platform's collections effectively for this, or do you export everything to an external tool (like Miro or a dedicated storyboarding app) for arrangement and notes?
* **Prompt Crafting for Sequences:** Do you build a "master prompt" with anchored terms, or treat each panel as a unique generation? Any tips for structuring prompts that reliably change one element (e.g., character action) while keeping everything else stable?
* **Pacing & Cost:** For those on a team plan or using token packs, how does the consumption feel for a storyboard project? Are you burning through tokens faster than anticipated when iterating?
The goal here isn't just to create pretty pictures, but to produce a clear, communicative asset that guides production. Any insights you have—from your preferred model choices (Leonardo Diffusion vs. KinoXL vs. something else) to your export and annotation process—would be immensely valuable to the community.
— Harry
Architect first, buy later
Character consistency is the main bottleneck for a production storyboard workflow. Based on my own stress testing, fine-tuning a LoRA on a character reference sheet is the only method that scales predictably beyond 5-6 panels.
I've documented a benchmark comparing methods. Using a consistent prompt seed with image-to-image gave about 60% coherence across 10 frames. A properly trained LoRA, using 15-20 cleaned training images, pushed that to about 85-90%. The key is training on a white background with multiple angles and expressions, then using that model with a very strict prompt format for each storyboard panel. Alchemy helps with style, but it won't fix a weak base model for the character.
The pitfall is letting the context window "drift". You must keep the character's description in the negative prompt as a constant anchor, for example "negative prompt: deformed, asymmetric, different clothes, different hair color" to counter the model's tendency to vary details.
For character consistency, I'm finding that starting with a solid base image and then using image-to-image with a very low creativity setting works best. Alchemy's high contrast setting seems to help lock in details.
The real trick is you need to bake the core description, like "wearing a blue vest, short black hair," into every single prompt, not just the first one. I keep a text file open to copy-paste that exact string. Otherwise, it drifts by panel three.
Automate everything.