Storyboard an Alternative Universe with AI exercise
Version 1.2
π Activity
This exercise shows how to create an illustrated storyboard by combining AI-assisted fiction writing with
AI-generated images.
Activity Part A: Write a story outline
In this exercise you'll create an AI-assisted text with pictures that represents a familiar story transposed to
an alternative universe. Your job is to depict a sequence of events that differs from the standard narrative in
some fundamental way. (The topic resembles but is not identical to the "break the cliche" Task.) Examples:
- An alternative timeline to our own in which the South won the Civil War.
- The story of your life if you had been born a different race or gender.
- A version of Star Wars in which Jar-Jar Binks is the chosen one rather than Anakin Skywalker.
- Spiderman but he's Karl Marx instead of Peter Parker.
Steps for generating a story outline:
- To help you brainstorm or flesh out an idea, ask the class AI for help before proceeding to the writing
stage. For example, you might suggest some stories that interest you and invite the chatbot to suggest
versions from alternative universes or "what if" scenarios. Or you might type in an idea that occurs to you
and ask the chatbot to improve or offer variations on it.
- Once you have an idea for a story, work with the chatbot to generate a story outline. See the sample prompt
in Recommendations below.
- Follow up with the chatbot to refine the outline incrementally. You may ask for tweaks to the central
conflict, character arcs, climax, or denouement.
- Post the complete story outline to #alternative-universe-story.
- Looking over everyone's submissions, distribute 1-3 thumbs-up emoji (π) to your favorite stories from other
teams (you cannot vote for your own).
- As a class, discuss what worked and what didn't.
Activity Part B: Illustrate two or more scenes
- Ask the chatbot to describe the characters, and follow up to refine them until you're satisfied. Sample
prompt:
π Write a vivid and interesting background summary of the two main characters,
including visual descriptions of their looks and clothing.
- Rewrite the appearance and personality descriptions generated in step 3 as prompts for Leonardo.ai to depict your main characters.
π© Optional: ask the class chatbot to generate text-to-image prompts based on those descriptions for you.
- Generate and refine images for two of your main characters using the recommendations listed below to ensure
consistent character design. Be sure to give each character a name as suggested in the recommendations.
- Rewrite (by hand or with AI) two of the scenes generated in part A to incorporate the character names.
- Ask the chatbot to generate images for both scenes, and refine them incrementally until you're satisfied
with the results.
π© Optional: Choose a different model (upper left in Leonardo interface) to see a different imagining of
your character.
- Post both text and images corresponding to the scenes you chose, along with your
AI-assisted character descriptions, to #alternative-universe-images.
β οΈStart with a post for the first scene, then add each subsequent scene as a reply to your first post so
we can see which image goes with which scene. Do not add all the images and text
together in a single post.
- Looking over everyone's submissions, distribute 1-3 thumbs-up emoji (π) to your favorite scene-and-image
combinations from other teams (you cannot vote for your own).
- As a class, discuss what worked and what didn't.
βοΈ Recommendations for generating stories
Storytelling parameters you can add to your prompts
Antagonist
Character arc
Climax
Coda
Conflict
Denouement
Genre
Plot
Point of view
Protagonist
Setting
Trope
Sample prompt for a story outline
π Acting as a best-selling author of fantasy adventure novels, you will help me write a vivid, fast-paced
short story. The story should break standard tropes and cliches, with surprising twists in plot, character
development, or point of view. Your story should be based on the following parameters:
Main character 1: ________________
Main character 2: ________________
Genre: ________________
Plot summary: ________________
Setting: ________________
Point of view: ________________
Mood: ________________
Write a short story divided into 6-12 paragraphs corresponding to different scenes. Clearly label each
paragraph with a scene number and location; an example might be "Scene 1: The Amazon Jungle," "Scene 2: The
University Laboratory," and so on.
βοΈ Recommendations for generating images
Tune the image style
Choose an image model and style that makes sense for your genre, eg 3d Animation Style for a children's story or
Isometric Fantasy for a game narrative.
Generate consistent character designs
Choose the same model for every image. (Don't pick the same seed.)
Pick a unique name for each character (eg, using BehindTheName.com
and refer to that name in every prompt for that character.
Photography parameters you can add to your prompts
Aperture
Aspect ratio
Bokeh
Depth of field
Eye-level shot
f-stop (eg, f/1.8 or f/22)
Far-shot
Film grain
Focal length
Full-body shot
Golden hour
Landscape orientation
Low-angle shot
Portrait orientation
Rule of thirds
Shutter speed
Wide-angle
Sample prompt for story illustrations
π A [medium] of a [subject/character name] with [details] in
the style of [style] with [composition].
Sample negative prompt for character portraits
π Negative prompt: two heads, two face, out of frame, extra fingers, mutated hands, poorly
drawn hands, poorly drawn face, mutation, deformed, ugly, blurry, bad anatomy, bad proportions, extra limbs,
cloned face, disfigured, out of frame, ugly, extra limbs, bad anatomy, gross proportions, malformed limbs,
missing arms, missing legs, extra arms, extra legs, mutated hands, fused fingers, too many fingers, long neck,
poorly drawn eyes, double heads, double faces, two heads, two faces