Martin Scorsese Is Using AI to Storyboard His Next Film – And It Changes Everything

 

The Academy Award-winning director has gone public as an adviser to Black Forest Labs, revealing he used the company’s FLUX image model in preproduction. What does it mean when cinema’s greatest living auteur embraces generative AI?

 

For more than seven decades, Martin Scorsese has been drawing his own storyboards by hand. From the operatic violence of ‘Taxi Driver’ to the labyrinthine tracking shots of ‘Goodfellas’, those hand-drawn sketches have been the bridge between his imagination and the crew that brings it to life. Now, for the first time, that process looks different – and the reason is a German AI startup called Black Forest Labs.

This week, Scorsese went public as a partner and adviser to Black Forest
Labs,the Freiburg-based company behind the FLUX family of text-to-image models. In a video shot at his New York City office, the 83-year-old director talks through how he used FLUX to visualise scenes for his forthcoming film ‘What Happens at Night’ – a snow-bound drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence. The announcement is the most significant Hollywood endorsement of a generative AI tool to date, and it arrives at a moment when the industry is still bitterly divided about what AI means for the creative trades.

 

Quick Facts: Scorsese × Black Forest Labs

– Partnership:  Adviser and partner role, signed approximately one year before public announcement
– Tool used:  FLUX text-to-image generative AI model
– Application:  Storyboarding and preproduction visualisation only
– Film: What Happens at Night (starring DiCaprio & Lawrence, Apple originals)
– No AI actors:  No generated actors, sets, or footage – only concept storyboards
– BFL valuation:  $3.25 billion (Series B, December 2025)

 

What Is Black Forest Labs, and Why Does It Matter?

Black Forest Labs was founded in 2024 by Robin Rombach and colleagues who had previously pioneered latent diffusion models at Stability AI – the same foundational research that underpins the most capable image generation systems in the world. In December 2025, the company raised a $300 million Series B led by AMP and Salesforce Ventures, placing its post-money valuation at $3.25 billion. Total funding now exceeds $450 million, with earlier backing from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, NVIDIA, and BroadLight Capital – the investment firm of Rick Yorn, who is also Scorsese’s talent manager.

FLUX has rapidly become the professional standard for high-quality text-to-image generation, integrated into products from Adobe, Canva, Meta, and Deutsche Telekom. Unlike some competitors, BFL has pursued both open-source and enterprise-grade deployments, making FLUX simultaneously accessible to independent artists and scalable for major studios.

CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz, an investor in BFL, helped broker Scorsese’s involvement – a detail that underlines how Hollywood’s most traditional power brokers are threading themselves into the AI ecosystem they publicly claim to regard with caution.

“For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards. There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew. There are some things you have to see and feel.” – Martin Scorsese

 

Storyboarding Is the Perfect Entry Point – and That’s Deliberate

The use case Scorsese has chosen is, tactically speaking, the least controversial possible application of generative AI on a film set. Storyboards are internal planning documents, not finished product. They are not seen by audiences. They do not replace actors, cinematographers, set designers, or costume departments. They are, in essence, elaborate communication tools – a way for a director to externalise a vision that would otherwise remain locked in their head.

Scorsese articulates the problem with characteristic directness: after seven decades of hand-drawn boards, he still found it difficult to convey the precise visual atmosphere he was imagining. FLUX, he says, allowed him to “share what I’m visualising more clearly and efficiently to my creative team – the production designer, art designer, and cinematographer – for them to build on.” He describes the ability to generate and immediately share a storyboard as “creatively freeing.”

The efficiency argument is also financial. “During the preproduction process, time costs money,” Scorsese noted, “and this allowed us to move faster without sacrificing quality or craft.” For studios weighing the economics of AI adoption, this framing matters: the tool is being sold not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a compression of the time between conception and collaboration.

 

A Career of Embracing New Technology

Sceptics may be tempted to frame Scorsese’s announcement as a late-career concession to novelty. That reading misunderstands both the man and his history with technology. Scorsese has consistently been among the first major filmmakers to adopt transformative tools when he believed they served the story.

– 2011 – Hugo:  Scorsese shot his first 3D feature, embracing stereoscopic cinema as a formal choice suited to a film about the birth of cinema itself.
– 2019 – The Irishman:  He deployed ILM’s de-aging technology extensively, allowing De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci to play characters across a 50-year timeline without recasting.
– 2025–26 – What Happens at Night:  FLUX used in preproduction storyboarding, with Scorsese joining Black Forest Labs as a formal partner and adviser.

“Cinema is a young medium, only around 125 years old, so we have to be open to how it can evolve,” Scorsese said in his statement. This is not a throwaway line. It is a philosophical position – one that situates AI not as a threat to cinema’s soul but as the latest chapter in its ongoing technical evolution.

 

Hollywood’s AI Divide Just Got More Complicated

Scorsese’s announcement lands in an industry that is nowhere near consensus on AI. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 placed AI use at the centre of labour negotiations, with hard-won contractual protections around performers’ digital likenesses and AI-generated scripts. Those concerns have not gone away.

Guillermo del Toro, speaking to *The Hollywood Reporter*, described the idea of someone from his team suggesting AI-generated content as “spitting on God.” Screenwriter Paul Schrader, addressing the AI on the Lot conference just last week, expressed a mixture of admiration and caution, arguing that “AI does not create – it combines.” These are not reactionary positions from people who don’t understand the technology; they are principled concerns about what creativity means and who it belongs to.

The pro-AI camp among top-tier filmmakers is also growing. James Cameron joined the board of Stability AI – the company from whose research Black Forest Labs directly emerged – in September 2025. The pattern is becoming clear: directors who pioneered expensive, technically complex production methods are disproportionately comfortable with AI tools. They have spent careers integrating new technology into artistry; generative AI is, to them, another instrument in a long-established practice.

*”Now, with this tool, I can share what I’m visualising more clearly and efficiently to my creative team – for them to build on to enrich cinematic intelligence.”*- Martin Scorsese

 

What Scorsese’s Endorsement Means for AI in Hollywood

Cultural endorsements work differently from technical validations, and Scorsese’s carries unusual weight. He is not simply a commercially successful director; he is the filmmaker most associated with the defence of cinema as an art form – the man who campaigned for film preservation, attacked content algorithms, and famously argued that Marvel films are not cinema. When he endorses something, it is understood to be a considered aesthetic choice.

For Black Forest Labs, the partnership signals that FLUX is not merely adequate for professional creative use – it is good enough for the most demanding visual intelligence in contemporary filmmaking. For other directors on the fence about AI tools, it changes the social calculus: using generative AI in storyboarding is no longer a concession to efficiency culture. It is something Martin Scorsese does.

It also models a specific, defensible use case. The limitations Scorsese has placed on his own practice – no generated actors, no synthetic sets, no AI footage – matter as much as the endorsement itself. They suggest a framework in which AI accelerates human creative communication without substituting for human performance or craft.

 

The Bottom Line

Martin Scorsese using AI to storyboard a film is not the end of cinema as we know it. It is, as he would almost certainly argue himself, a continuation of cinema’s perpetual negotiation between craft and technology. But it does mark a clear inflection point.

The most credible living voice for cinema as an art form has placed his reputation behind a specific generative AI tool, for a specific and circumscribed use, in service of a specific creative problem he has been trying to solve for 70 years. That is a more interesting story than either the techno-optimist narrative (“AI will transform filmmaking”) or the techno-pessimist one (“AI will destroy it”).

It is the story of a master craftsman finding a new instrument and explaining, with characteristic precision, exactly what it is good for – and what it is not. The rest of Hollywood would do well to pay close attention.

 

The Death of the Storyboard Artist? Why Human Creativity Still Matters

Artificial Intelligence is moving at an astonishing pace.

Every week there seems to be another headline announcing the end of a profession. Writers. Designers. Photographers. Editors. Illustrators.

And now, storyboard artists.

The argument goes something like this: Why hire a storyboard artist when AI can generate hundreds of cinematic images in a matter of seconds? At first glance, it sounds convincing. But I think it fundamentally misunderstands what a storyboard artist actually does. And that’s why I don’t believe we’re witnessing the death of the storyboard artist at all.

What we’re seeing is something very different.

We’re witnessing the evolution of a profession that has always been about much more than drawing pictures.

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“The storyboard artist isn’t just drawing pictures. They’re solving problems.”

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What Does A Storyboard Artist Actually Do?

Most people think storyboard artists are simply illustrators.

Someone hands them a script and they draw scenes. In reality, the job is far more sophisticated than that. A storyboard artist sits at the intersection of storytelling, cinematography, production design and practical problem solving.

Their role is to help directors, producers, cinematographers and creative teams visualise ideas before expensive cameras start rolling.

They answer questions such as:

• Where should the camera be positioned?
• How does the audience’s eye move through a scene?
• What information needs to be revealed and when?
• Which shots are essential?
• How can a sequence be made more dramatic, emotional or efficient?

Good storyboard artists don’t simply document ideas.

They improve them.

This is why storyboard artists have played an essential role in everything from Hollywood blockbusters to television dramas, advertising campaigns and animation.

According to the British Film Institute, visual planning has long been a crucial part of filmmaking, helping creative teams communicate complex ideas before production begins.

The Hidden Skill Nobody Talks About

A great storyboard artist understands storytelling.

Not software.

Not drawing techniques.

Storytelling.

That’s the real skill.

The best storyboard artists instinctively understand:

• tension
• pacing
• rhythm
• emotional impact
• visual hierarchy

These are human skills.

They’re built through experience.

They’re developed through collaboration.

They’re refined by making mistakes and learning from them.

AI can generate images.

But storytelling is much harder.

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“Anybody can generate a picture. Very few people can tell a story.”

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How AI Is Changing Storyboarding

Let’s be honest.

AI is already changing the industry. Ignoring that reality would be foolish.
Tools can now generate mood boards, concept images and rough visual sequences in seconds.
For directors and creative teams, that’s incredibly useful.
Tasks that once took days can now be completed in hours.

Early-stage ideation becomes faster.
Visual exploration becomes easier.

Communication becomes more efficient. Those are genuine advantages. The mistake is assuming that efficiency automatically replaces expertise.

History suggests otherwise.

Technology rarely eliminates creative professions overnight.

Instead, it changes the tools those professionals use.Photographers adapted to digital cameras. Editors adapted to non-linear editing systems. Graphic designers adapted to desktop publishing.

Storyboard artists will adapt too.

The artists who embrace new technology are often the ones who thrive.

Why Human Judgement Still Matters

Imagine you’re directing a film.

You have ten possible ways to shoot a scene.

AI can generate all ten.

But which one is best?

Which shot creates the strongest emotional impact?

Which angle increases tension?

Which sequence improves pacing?

Which camera movement enhances the story?

Those decisions require judgement.

And judgement remains stubbornly human.

This is where experienced storyboard artists continue to bring enormous value.

They’re not simply image creators.

They’re visual strategists.

Lessons From Other Creative Industries

I’ve seen similar debates before.

Photography was supposedly doomed when digital cameras arrived.

Then smartphones were going to destroy photography.

Then AI-generated images were going to finish the job.

Yet professional photography still exists.

In some areas, it’s thriving.

Why?

Because clients don’t just buy images.

They buy expertise.

They buy perspective.

They buy problem solving.

They buy confidence.

The same principle applies to storyboard artists.

The tool may change.

The need for expertise remains.

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“Technology changes the tools. It rarely removes the need for talent.”

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What Storyboard Artists Can Learn From AI

Rather than fearing AI, storyboard artists may benefit from asking a different question.

How can AI help me become more valuable?

The answer could include:

• Faster concept development
• Rapid visual exploration
• Alternative shot generation
• Research assistance
• Production preparation

Used intelligently, AI can become a creative assistant rather than a replacement.

The artists who learn to combine traditional storytelling skills with modern tools may become more effective than ever before.

Why This Matters Beyond Film

This conversation isn’t really about storyboard artists.

It’s about creativity.

It’s about how humans communicate ideas visually.

And that’s something that affects almost every creative profession.

As a photographer, I spend much of my time helping people communicate visually.

Whether I’m creating actor headshots, corporate portraits or personal branding images, the goal is the same.

The image needs to tell a story.

It needs to communicate something meaningful.

It needs to create an emotional response.

That’s what storyboard artists do.

That’s what photographers do.

And that’s what AI still struggles to do consistently.

For anyone interested in visual storytelling, you might also enjoy reading:

• The Power of a Headshot
• What Casting Directors Look For In Actor Headshots
• Acting Headshot Examples
• Corporate Headshots London

Each explores a different aspect of how images communicate meaning and influence perception.

So, Is This The Death Of The Storyboard Artist?

I don’t think so.

Some aspects of the profession will undoubtedly change. Certain routine tasks may become automated, workflows will evolve. Expectations will shift, but storytelling isn’t disappearing.

Human judgement isn’t disappearing. Creative collaboration isn’t disappearing.

The ability to solve visual problems isn’t disappearing. And as long as those things remain valuable, storyboard artists will remain valuable too. The profession may look different in five years.

It may look different in ten.

But reports of its death appear to be greatly exaggerated.

The future belongs not to those who resist technology.

Nor to those who blindly trust it.

The future belongs to those who understand how to combine human creativity with powerful new tools.

And that’s a much more interesting story.