How to write a prompt-ready shot list before you generate anything

You open a new project with a clear idea of the scene and start generating. Forty minutes later you have a dozen lovely clips and no idea how they fit together. The kitchen is lit from the left in one and the right in another, the hero's coat has changed length, and you cannot say which shot is meant to cover the line about the letter. The footage is fine. The plan was missing.

A traditional shot list tells a crew where to put the camera. An AI shot list has a harder job, because it also has to be the thing you paste from. If each line carries its own prompt, its own continuity notes and a reason for existing, you generate with intent and you edit with a map. It takes about twenty minutes to write for a one-minute scene, and it saves you far more than that in rerolls.

The five columns

Use a spreadsheet or a plain table in a notes app. One row per shot, five columns:

```
ID | Purpose | Prompt | Carry-over | Cut out on
```

ID is a scene and shot number, such as 03-04. This becomes the filename prefix for every take.

Purpose is one sentence on why the shot exists. If you cannot write it, delete the shot. Examples: establishes the room, shows her reaction to the news, gives the edit somewhere to go during the voiceover.

Prompt is the full text you will paste, written out in advance. Do not improvise it at the generator.

Carry-over lists what must match the neighbouring shots: wardrobe, light direction, time of day, which way the character faces, props in hand.

Cut out on names the action or beat where the shot ends, such as she lifts her eyes or the door closes. This tells you how much to generate and where to trim.

A worked row

```
03-04 | Her reaction to the letter | Medium close-up, woman in her fifties in a green wool coat reads a folded letter at a kitchen table, window light from camera left, she looks up slowly toward the door, static camera, shallow depth of field | Coat buttoned, light from left, letter in right hand, facing screen right | Eyes reach the door
```

Notice what the prompt does and does not hold. It holds the single action, the light direction and the camera behaviour. It leaves out anything that belongs to a different shot, such as what is on the other side of the door. One shot, one job.

Plan the variety on purpose

Before you fill the rows, scan the Purpose column for repetition. Five consecutive medium shots is a sign you planned by habit. Mark each row wide, medium, close or insert, and make sure no more than two neighbours share a size. Add at least one insert per scene, a hand, an object, a screen. Inserts are cheap to generate and they rescue your pacing when a main shot has a flaw at the tail.

Generate in order of risk

Sort your generation order by difficulty, not by scene order. Do the shots with faces, hands and complex motion first, while your credits are full. If one proves unmanageable, you can rewrite the row or replace it with an insert before you have sunk the budget into easy shots that now have nothing to cut to.

What you should see

Without the list, you finish generating with a pile of takes and spend the edit discovering what is missing. With it, each clip arrives already named, already tied to a purpose, and already checked against its neighbours for light and wardrobe. You spot gaps while there is still budget to fill them, and the edit becomes assembly instead of rescue.

Try this next

Take your current scene and write only the Purpose column for every shot you think you need. Cut any row you cannot justify in a sentence. Then write the prompts for the three riskiest shots and generate those first.