Quill is an editor and coach, never a ghostwriter: it gives notes, asks questions, and reads what you've written - it never writes your prose or screenplay for you. That line is built into the product, not just a promise.Prefer to write with no AI at all? Turn off âQuill & AI featuresâ in Settings â Preferences and every AI tool disappears - Quill, Greenlight, storyboards, table reads, portraits, and the credit balance. The Final Draft-style screenplay editor, manuscript and book formatting, collaboration, the Workshop, and the whole community stay exactly as they are.It's fully reversible: your work, credits, and settings are kept while AI is hidden, and turning it back on restores everything. You can also make this choice when you first sign up.Story vs. script - two sides of one project
The development side and the written page, and how they feed each other.
- Every project has two sides. The Story side is your development workspace - beats, characters, world, themes, and timeline - the thinking behind the film. The screenplay is the written page itself, in the Writers Room editor. They're linked, but they're not the same file.
- Your beats, cast, and world inform the script; the script is where the actual scenes live. Quill's tools read from both - so the more you develop the Story side, the more grounded the notes on the page. None of it is required, though: an imported screenplay stands on its own, and every tool reads what you've actually written.
- Want cast portraits, a table read, a storyboard, or development notes folded into your coverage? Link the screenplay to a story - âExtract Cast & Worldâ creates and links one for you, reading the cast and settings straight out of the script.
- There's no required order. Plotters build the beats first, then write; pantsers write first and pull the structure out afterward. Both paths use the same tools - and if you already know your structure, you can start a project with no beat sheet at all (see Getting started).
Storyboard
Turn a scene into image panels - when the tool is turned on.
- Storyboard rolls out gradually, so it appears only once it's turned on for your account. It works best after Extract Cast & World and a round of portraits, since panels use your characters' portraits for continuity.
- Set plates keep a place looking like itself: build one for a location and every scene there uses it as the establishing reference. If you haven't built one but the matching location on your World tab has a picture, that picture is used instead - so you never have to upload the same room twice. A set plate you built always wins over the World picture.
- Choose how panels look first (top of the board): a Storyboard sketch or a Detailed render. A Storyboard sketch is rough black-and-white line art that shows framing, blocking, and movement without committing to a look - use it when the director should picture the shot, not the film's final style (a polished render can read as 'this IS the look'). Detailed renders are finished, camera-ready frames for visual writers and pitch decks; they add the Look choice below.
- For a Detailed render, pick the Look: Illustrated or Photoreal. Illustrated - a hand-drawn or painted storyboard - renders every scene reliably (including sensitive ones like children, medical, or violence) and is faster and cheaper; it's what storyboards traditionally look like. Photoreal is cinematic film-still realism, great for pitches, but the image content filter blocks some sensitive scenes, so a few panels may fail. The look defaults from your story's World Style and drives your portraits too; you can override it per board. Changing it affects only new renders, so regenerate to match.
- If a board has mature or artistic scenes the default renderer keeps refusing - they come back empty - open Board settings and turn on âMature / artistic scenes.â It switches that board to a more permissive renderer so those shots generate, and works with either Look.
- Open Storyboard, pick a scene, and build the establishing shot first - an image of the empty location (priced like a panel, by the board's Quality tier) that keeps every panel consistent; reuse it across same-location scenes for free. Leave the prompt blank and Quill reads the whole scene to build the set - its layout, furniture, and props - so the space holds together shot to shot, or click âSuggest the setâ (free) to see and tweak it first. You can also upload your own establishing shot instead - free.
- âSuggest panelsâ is free - Quill proposes a staging plan and shot list. Suggested shots appear as empty âdraftâ cards until you render them: refine a shot, then click Generate (priced per panel by the board's Quality tier), or âGenerate allâ to render a scene's drafts at once. A card with no image just means it hasn't been generated yet.
- Board settings has a Quality tier that sets the renderer and the price per panel: Draft is fast and cheap for blocking out a board, Standard is the everyday tier, and Best uses Quill's strongest renderer for character and set consistency - worth it for the final pass. Each option shows its credit price right in the menu, and every render button re-prices when you change the tier.
- Run âSuggest panelsâ again any time - itâs additive and gap-aware: Quill looks at the shots you already have (generated panels and drafts) and proposes only the missing ones to fill the gaps, never duplicating or wiping your work. If your shot list already covers the scene, it adds nothing and tells you so.
- âGenerate allâ roughs out the scene fast; for the tightest continuity, then walk the panels top to bottom, getting each one right before the next - panels carry from your portraits, the establishing shot, and the previous panel.
- Bring your own art: upload a rough composition sketch for Quill to render a polished panel from (priced like a panel, by the board's Quality tier), or drop in your own finished image for any panel (free). Both land in the panel's History like any render.
- A character with no accepted portrait still renders from their saved Appearance, but a portrait is what keeps their face consistent panel to panel - they show greyed with an âadd a portraitâ link. If a panel misses someone, open âCast · edit,â tick them, Save, and regenerate.
- Every shot carries a number (14A, 14BâŠ). Open âShot notesâ on any panel to record the Action, Dialogue, and the details a crew needs - angle, camera move, lens, duration, audio, transition. The shot's size and angle also guide the image (so a close-up renders as a close-up from the right angle); the rest is a production layer that never changes the picture. When you âSuggest panels,â Quill pre-fills the angle, move, a rough duration, and the scene's dialogue for you to confirm.
- âShot listâ (top of the board) opens the whole film as a table: every shot with its number, size, angle, move, lens, duration, cast, action, and dialogue. Filter by scene, search, and export to CSV or PDF for the crew.
- âAnimaticâ plays your rendered panels as a timed slideshow, using each shot's duration (set it in Shot notes; shots with no time default to a few seconds). Space plays/pauses, the arrow keys step, and the timeline scrubs - a quick moving preview of the sequence. âDownload MP4â exports it as a silent video to share.
- Every render stays in History to reuse for free. Export two ways: âContact sheet (PDF)â is a compact thumbnail grid; âStoryboard pages (PDF)â prints one shot per row with its number, action, dialogue, and notes.
