How We Built an AI Screenplay-to-Storyboard Pipeline in Go

We built StoryBirdie — a tool that takes a screenplay file and turns it into a complete storyboard with shot lists, camera angles, and AI-generated frames. The entire backend is Go. This post covers why we chose Go, how we structured the pipeline, and the architecture decisions that worked out (and the ones that didn't). The Problem Directors write screenplays. Then they need storyboards — visual frame-by-frame plans showing what each camera shot looks like. Traditionally this means either drawing (most directors can't) or hiring a storyboard artist ($500-2,000 per scene). We wanted to automate the pipeline: screenplay file in, production-ready storyboard PDF out. Why Go We considered Python (FastAPI) and Go (Chi). Go won for three reasons: Single binary deployment. Our backend compiles to one binary. No virtualenvs, no dependency resolution at deploy time, no "works on my machine." We deploy to Azure Container Apps — push the image, done. Concurrency for batch operations. Parts of our