skills/ai-film-pipeline-master/references/phase-01-story-generation/formats-film.md

# Formats — film

Entry point into the database. Each kit is a ranked short list; open the `cat-*.md` named in the row for the full card.

A format kit answers one question: **given this format's constraints, which techniques earn their place, and why this one rather than the obvious one.** The ranking is the argument.

**Shelf life.** Page counts, runtime norms and festival rules move; the craft underneath does not. Numbers checked 2026-09. Review 2028-09.

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## Contents

- [Feature Film](#feature-film)
- [Short Film](#short-film)
- [Animation Feature](#animation-feature)
- [Trailer and Teaser](#trailer-and-teaser)
- [Coverage](#coverage)
- [Sources](#sources)

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## Feature Film

**Constraints:** 90 to 120 pages, one page to one minute, and the market has been contracting toward the low end — 90 to 110 is the safe band for a spec, and Hollywood scripts now rarely run past 114 pages. Comedy sits at 90 to 105, drama at 100 to 115, action reaching 120. Under 80 reads as underwritten; over 120 reads as unproduceable before anyone opens page one. One sitting, no pause, no recap, no second chance: an audience that disengages at minute 40 does not return at minute 70. Budget is decided off the page, so every location and speaking part you write is a number somebody else has to defend.

**Grammar:** The feature is the only format with enough runway to make a character's change the *subject* rather than a side effect, and that is the whole reason to use it. Meaning is built by a single line of causation: one protagonist, one want, one opposition tailored to the specific weakness that want exposes. The midpoint is not a marker, it is the hinge where the character stops reacting and starts driving — if the second half plays the same game as the first half, you have written a 60-minute film twice. Eight sequences of 12 to 15 pages is the working unit, not three acts; three acts describes a finished film, eight sequences is a way to build one. Theme is settled by what the ending costs, never by what anyone says about it. The climax must be the one event that resolves the plot and the character at the same instant, or the film has two endings and the audience will feel the seam.

**Palette:** 8 sequences · 40–60 scenes · 1 protagonist · 1 controlling idea · 1 midpoint reversal · 1 cost paid at the end

**Rules:** Write the ending first, then build the causal chain backwards to it | Build in sequences of 12–15 pages, not in three acts | Make the midpoint flip the protagonist from reacting to acting | Design the opposition against this protagonist's weakness, not against the plot | Every scene turns a value or it is cut, merged or transplanted | State the controlling idea in one sentence and test every act break against it | Pay the climax's price in something the protagonist actually wants | Answer the opening image with the closing image | Keep the proper-noun and location count as low as the story tolerates — budget reads the page | Cut ten pages after the first draft before showing anyone

**Examples:** contemporary mid-budget drama (*The Holdovers*, *Past Lives*), genre specs that sell on structure (*Get Out*, *A Quiet Place*), the modern character feature that runs 100 minutes because it was designed to

**Avoid:** The second act that is a corridor rather than an escalation — the commonest cause of a film dying at minute 50, and it is always a want problem, not a pace problem. The protagonist carried through their own story by other people's decisions. The theme delivered as a speech in the third act, which reads as the writer distrusting their own structure. Too many endings: every scene after the climax is a tax, and a feature can afford exactly one epilogue beat. And the padded-to-page-count draft — a 118-page script that should be 102 reads as a writer who cannot see their own work.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Sequence Approach** (Structure) `struct.sequence_approach`
   Eight 12–15 page units is the only structural model that maps onto how a feature is actually drafted and rewritten; three acts describes the result, this builds it.
2. **The Controlling Idea** (Theme) `theme.controlling_idea`
   One sentence naming value and cause. In a 110-minute piece it is the only thing that can decide which of two equally good scenes gets cut.
3. **The Want** (Arc) `arc.the_want`
   Feature length is unforgiving of a vague want: it produces a vague second act. Make it concrete, visible and losable by page 25.
4. **The Lie** (Arc) `arc.the_lie`
   This is what separates the feature from short form — you have the runtime to test a false belief repeatedly instead of stating it once.
5. **The Tailored Opponent** (Antagonist) `anta.tailored_opponent`
   Not the strongest possible opposition, the one built to attack this protagonist's particular weakness. Generic antagonists are why second acts feel arbitrary.
6. **The Midpoint** (Structure) `struct.three_act_midpoint`
   The hinge where reaction becomes action. Get it wrong and the film's two halves play the same scene forty times.
7. **The Value Turn** (Scene) `scene.value_turn`
   Applied ruthlessly across 50 scenes, this is what keeps a two-hour film from having a slow patch. It also generates the cheapest cut list you will ever get.
8. **Self-Revelation** (Structure) `struct.truby_20_self_revelation`
   The moment the protagonist sees what the audience saw an hour ago. The feature is the only format that can afford to make them wait that long.
9. **The Cost Paid** (Endings) `end.cost_paid`
   A feature ending is judged on price, not outcome. An audience forgives a sad ending and never forgives a free one.
10. **The Earned Ending** (Endings) `end.earned_ending`
    Two hours of setup makes an unearned climax unforgivable in a way a short film's never is — the audience has invested and will audit.
11. **Opening Image, Answered** (Openings) `open.opening_image_answered`
    The feature is long enough that the audience has half-forgotten the first shot, which is exactly what makes the rhyme land when it returns.
12. **The Final Image** (Endings) `end.final_image`
    The last thing on screen is what the film is remembered as. Design it before you write the third act, not after.
13. **The Plant and the Payoff** (Information) `info.plant_and_payoff`
    Only feature runtime puts enough distance between plant and payoff for the payoff to feel like fate rather than setup.
14. **The Obstacle Ladder** (Antagonist) `anta.obstacle_ladder`
    The tool that turns a flat second act into a rising one: each obstacle costs more than the last and closes an option.
15. **The Lie in One Line** (Character) `char.lie_in_one_line`
    Before page one. If you cannot write it in a line, the second act will discover you cannot write it at all.
16. **The Dead Scene Test** (Scene) `scene.dead_scene_test`
    The rewrite tool that gets 118 pages to 104 without losing story — apply it before you start trimming description.
17. **The Thematic Argument Scene** (Theme) `theme.argument_scene`
    One scene where both sides of the film's question are spoken by people who mean them. The legitimate alternative to the third-act theme speech.
18. **The Defining Action Entrance** (Character) `char.defining_action_entrance`
    A feature introduces eight to twelve people who must still be distinguishable two hours later. Each arrives doing something only they would do.
19. **The Relationship Arc** (Relationships) `rel.relationship_arc`
    Give the central pairing its own want and its own turn; it is what stops the B-story being filler between set-pieces.
20. **Merge Two Scenes** (Scene) `scene.merge_two_scenes`
    The page-count fix that improves the script instead of damaging it. Two thin scenes combined almost always produce a scene with more pressure.

---

**The visual kit (ranked):**

1. **Lighting Ratio** (Lighting) `light.ratio`
   The only visual decision with two hours to travel in. Open at two to one and reach eight to one at the collapse, and the audience reads the change as the story changing without noticing the light at all.
2. **Colour Temperature as Mood** (Colour) `color.temperature`
   Mapped across the script rather than chosen per scene - home warm, work cool - it is the cheapest thing that makes 110 minutes feel like one film, and it survives being cut out of order.
3. **Depth Staging** (Blocking) `block.depth_staging`
   The feature's budget argument as well as its craft one: a scene staged in depth plays in one setup where a flat one needs four, and it reads as confidence rather than as economy.
4. **Angle Change as a Power Shift** (Angle) `angle.power_shift`
   A feature is the only format long enough for the audience to have learned who is looked up at. Reverse it at the midpoint and the shift lands without a line of dialogue.
5. **The 180-Degree Rule** (Angle) `angle.rule_180`
   Not a rule about one scene but about fifty of them: the geography the audience builds over two hours is the thing a single crossed line destroys.
6. **Cut on Action** (Cuts) `cut.on_action`
   Applied around a thousand times in a feature, this is what makes the cutting invisible. The obvious alternative, cutting on the line, is what makes a film feel televisual.
7. **Normal Lens (40 to 50mm)** (Lens) `lens.normal_40_50`
   The register a feature returns to between its effects. A film shot entirely on long or wide glass has spent its vocabulary by minute thirty and has nothing left for the climax.
8. **Close-Up** (Shot size) `size.cu`
   In a feature the close-up is currency, not coverage. Withheld through the first act it is worth something at the turn; spent evenly it is worth nothing anywhere.
9. **Depth Layers: Foreground, Midground, Background** (Composition) `comp.depth_layers`
   What lets a frame hold two ideas at once, which is how a feature carries a subplot without stopping for it.
10. **Opening Image, Answered** (Composition) `comp.frame_within_frame`
   The device that makes a returning image read as a rhyme rather than a repeat - and the feature is long enough that the audience has half-forgotten the first one.
11. **24 fps** (Format) `look.fps_24`
   The cadence the format is read in. Everything else here assumes it, and a feature delivered at another rate is making a statement whether it meant to or not.
12. **Shallow Depth of Field** (Lens) `lens.shallow_dof`
   Ranked last on purpose. It is the default of every cheap-looking film, and in a feature it earns its place only where the background is genuinely irrelevant, which is rarer than it looks.

## Short Film

**Constraints:** 40 minutes including credits is the outer limit for Academy Award eligibility, but that number is a trap — programmers overwhelmingly prefer under 15 minutes, and 20 to 40 minute films are hard to slot into a shorts block and are rejected at much higher rates. The working target is 5 to 12 minutes. Watched inside a programmed block of six to ten films by an audience that did not choose yours specifically, often two hours into the session. Submission fees make every entry a real cost, and Oscar qualification runs through a festival win inside a defined window rather than through a release.

**Grammar:** A short is not a small feature; it is a single situation pushed until it turns. One character, one problem, one turn — a second protagonist usually halves the effect rather than doubling it. There is no room to establish, so everything is established by implication: one object, one overheard line, one piece of behaviour. The whole form runs on what is withheld. The last shot carries a larger share of the meaning than in any other narrative format, because the audience will be watching the next film ninety seconds later and only the final image survives the block. The best shorts are built backwards from one image the writer could not forget.

**Palette:** 5–12 minutes · 1 situation · 1 turn · 2–3 speaking characters · 1–2 locations · 1 final image

**Rules:** Find the one turn first; if there are two, you have two films | Start at the last possible moment before the turn | Establish nothing, imply everything | Keep to one or two locations, not for budget but for pressure | Give the audience one object to read the whole story through | Cut the instant the turn lands, not after the reaction | Write the last image before the first line | Never explain the ending — this form has no room for a second pass | Write it so one face can carry a minute of silence

**Examples:** Oscar-qualifying live-action shorts (*The Silent Child*, *Skin*, *An Irish Goodbye*), single-location two-hander shorts, festival-circuit shorts built around one performance

**Avoid:** The compressed feature — a three-act structure crushed into nine minutes, which plays as a synopsis rather than a film and is the standard shorts-programmer rejection. The twist ending that exists only to be a twist and tells you nothing about the character; programmers have seen it and stopped being surprised roughly a decade ago. Running to 22 minutes because the material is good: that is a scheduling problem, not a quality judgement, and it costs you bookings. Over-establishing in the first ninety seconds while the block audience is still settling. And the short that is secretly a pitch deck for a feature — it plays as an incomplete thing because it is one.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Value Turn** (Scene) `scene.value_turn`
   In a feature this governs each of fifty scenes. In a short it governs the film. Everything else is delivery.
2. **The Final Image** (Endings) `end.final_image`
   The format's centre of gravity. Build the whole piece toward one frame and the short survives the block; skip it and the short evaporates.
3. **Late Entry** (Scene) `scene.late_entry`
   With twelve minutes, arrival scenes are unaffordable. Start after the argument has already begun.
4. **Early Exit** (Scene) `scene.early_exit`
   Cut on the turn. Shorts overwhelmingly die in their last ninety seconds, from explaining what has already landed.
5. **The Iceberg Principle** (Exposition) `expo.iceberg_principle`
   The short form is the purest application: the audience must sense a world you never have time to show them.
6. **The Iceberg** (Subtext) `sub.iceberg_omission`
   Omission as positive construction rather than shortage. What you leave out is the film.
7. **Open Mid-Situation** (Openings) `open.open_mid_situation`
   No frame is spent on arrival, and the audience does the establishing work for free while catching up.
8. **The Object That Carries It** (Emotion) `emo.object_carrier`
   One object doing the work of a backstory scene — the highest-value trade available at this length.
9. **Environmental Exposition** (Exposition) `expo.environmental_detail`
   The room tells you who lives in it. Dialogue doing the same job costs a minute you do not have.
10. **The Transaction Scene** (Scene) `scene.transaction_scene`
    Two people, one thing wanted, one thing withheld. A whole short in a single structural shape.
11. **Understate at the Peak** (Emotion) `emo.understate_at_peak`
    There is no runway here to earn a big emotional register, so the register comes down to meet the runtime.
12. **The Last Line** (Endings) `end.last_line`
    At this size the last line and the last image are nearly the entire ending. Write both deliberately.
13. **The Threshold Scene** (Scene) `scene.threshold_scene`
    A doorway, a decision, a point of no return — a shape that reads as a complete arc in three minutes.
14. **The Wound as a Rule of Conduct** (Character) `char.wound_as_rule`
    Backstory expressed as a rule the character visibly obeys. Depth with no flashback and no exposition.
15. **The Specific Detail** (Emotion) `emo.specific_detail`
    One precise, odd, true detail buys more credibility in a short than a page of establishing would.
16. **The Granted Wish** (Scene) `scene.granted_wish`
    Give the character exactly what they asked for and let it be wrong. A complete ironic turn inside one scene.
17. **The Quiet Ending** (Endings) `end.quiet_ending`
    The alternative to the twist, and it plays better in a block precisely because it is not competing for volume.
18. **The Recontextualising Reveal** (Information) `info.recontextualising_reveal`
    The legitimate version of the shorts twist: it re-reads everything before it instead of replacing it.
19. **The Physical Signature** (Character) `char.physical_signature`
    One piece of behaviour is all the characterisation a five-minute film can hold. Choose it; do not discover it.
20. **Real Time** (Time) `time.real_time`
    A short is already close to real time. Committing to it turns the constraint into a pressure system.

---

**The visual kit (ranked):**

1. **Frame Within a Frame** (Composition) `comp.frame_within_frame`
   A short establishes by implication or not at all. A doorway, a mirror, a window does the work an establishing sequence would need ninety seconds for.
2. **Wide Shot / Long Shot** (Shot size) `size.ws`
   One wide, placed once, is the whole of a short's world-building. Two wides is usually a short that thinks it is a feature.
3. **Single-Source Lighting** (Lighting) `light.single_source`
   One situation wants one light. A short lit with a full kit reads as a showreel; lit from the thing in the room it reads as a place.
4. **Long Take** (Blocking) `block.ensemble_oner`
   A short is a single situation pushed until it turns, and the oner is the form that refuses to cut away from it. It also removes the coverage a five-minute film has no time to earn.
5. **The Value Turn** (Cuts) `cut.withheld`
   The turn is the entire film, so the cut that withholds it is the film's structure rather than a device inside it.
6. **Extreme Close-Up** (Shot size) `size.ecu`
   The one object a short establishes everything through. Used once it is the film's thesis; used four times it is a style.
7. **Negative Space** (Composition) `comp.negative_space`
   What a short has instead of exposition. An empty half of frame states an absence that would otherwise cost a scene.
8. **Colour Temperature as Mood** (Colour) `color.temperature`
   In twelve minutes there is room for exactly one temperature shift, and it should land on the turn. A feature's map of warm and cool scenes does not scale down.
9. **Eye Level** (Angle) `angle.eye_level`
   The short's default, and the reason a single departure from it registers. A film that starts angled has nowhere to go.
10. **Clear the Frame and Hold** (Blocking) `block.clear_frame_and_hold`
   The ending most shorts need and few use: the character leaves and the frame stays, which is the only way to end on a situation rather than on a face.

## Animation Feature

**Constraints:** Animation scripts run shorter than live action — typically 80 to 100 pages against 110-plus — because animation is priced by the frame and nobody funds a minute the story does not require. Finished runtimes cluster at 85 to 100 minutes. The script is not the final document: boards outrank pages, sequences are re-boarded and re-recorded for years, and a story team will rebuild your material. Description is read literally, so anything you did not write will not be drawn. The audience is doubled by commercial necessity — a child and the adult who paid, in adjacent seats. International box office means surviving dubbing into thirty languages, which quietly kills wordplay, and the four-quadrant target means the comedy must work without irony.

**Grammar:** Animation builds meaning through visible transformation. Because everything is constructed, the inner state can be externalised without apology: a want can literally be an object carried, a place to reach, a shape to become. The form runs on repetition with variation — a gesture, a phrase or a gag is planted, recurs, and returns inverted in the third act, and that inversion is usually the emotional climax. Comedy and feeling are not separate tracks: the same running gag that got laughs in act one delivers the grief in act three, and the grief only lands because the laugh built the pattern. Dual-audience writing is structural, not decorative — the child follows the want, the adult follows the cost. Because the boards will rewrite you, write the beats to be robust and the jokes to be replaceable.

**Palette:** 80–100 pages · 85–100 minutes · 1 physical want · 1 carried object · 3 plants per payoff · 2 audiences · 1 inverted callback

**Rules:** Make the want physical, visible and reachable — a place, an object, a performance | Write description literally; what you did not write will not be drawn | Plant every payoff three times and invert it on the third | Build the adult layer into the situation, never into a reference joke | Write jokes that survive translation — situation and physics, not wordplay | Give the sidekick one want of their own or they become a commentary track | Externalise the internal: shape, place, object, weather | Design the emotional climax as the callback to the funniest early beat | Assume the board artists will improve your gags, and protect the beat structure instead

**Examples:** Pixar and Disney Animation features, *Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse*, *Klaus*, *Flow*, Studio Ghibli features, Aardman

**Avoid:** Jokes built on English wordplay, which vanish in the twelfth dub and take the scene's rhythm with them. The adult layer delivered as pop-culture reference — invisible to the child and dated within two years. The sidekick with no want, who is narration with a face. Under-described action, which in animation is not minimalism but an absent scene. And the four-quadrant flinch: sanding down the real loss in act two, which is the exact thing this format does better than live action, because an audience that accepts a heightened world will accept heightened grief.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **Desire Made Physical** (Character) `char.desire_made_physical`
   Animation's native move. A want you can see across a room works for a five-year-old and still reads as image for everyone else.
2. **The Story Spine** (Structure) `struct.story_spine`
   Once upon a time / every day / until one day. Built for exactly this form, and it survives years of re-boarding intact.
3. **The Positive Change Arc** (Arc) `arc.positive_change`
   The genre default, and a default is not a weakness here — the audience contract expects change, so the interest lives in the cost, not the direction.
4. **Theme Carried by an Object** (Theme) `theme.object_carrier`
   A held object can carry a theme across 90 minutes of visual noise and still be readable to a child in the last shot.
5. **The Two-Audience Layer** (Subtext) `sub.dual_audience`
   The structural version of dual-audience writing, as opposed to the reference-joke version that dates instantly.
6. **Subtext a Child Can Actually Read** (Subtext) `sub.kid_readable_subtext`
   Subtext rendered as visible behaviour. Children read behaviour fluently and read implication badly.
7. **Building a Joke That Survives Translation** (Comedy) `comedy.translation_resistance`
   International box office is most of the budget's justification. Physical and situational comedy travels; puns do not.
8. **The Callback Payoff** (Comedy) `comedy.callback_payoff`
   The form's emotional engine. The third-act inversion of a first-act gag is where animated features do their crying.
9. **The Rule of Three** (Comedy) `comedy.rule_of_three`
   Plant, repeat, break. It governs gags, but in animation it also governs how any rule of the world gets taught.
10. **Rule by Demonstration** (Exposition) `expo.rule_by_demonstration`
    Invented worlds need rules and children will not sit through lore. Show the rule breaking something.
11. **Nature as Opposition** (Antagonist) `anta.nature`
    Opposition without a villain — the form's escape route from the sanded-down corporate antagonist.
12. **Give the Supporting Character One Want** (Character) `char.supporting_character_want`
    The one-line fix for the comic sidekick problem. One want turns commentary into a character.
13. **The Physical Signature** (Character) `char.physical_signature`
    In animation the signature is designed, not performed, so it has to be on the page — a walk, a tic, a shape.
14. **Rhythm in Screenwriting Action Lines** (Rhythm) `rhythm.action_line_rhythm`
    Description here is production instruction, not flavour. The action line must be literal and still keep tempo.
15. **The Running Gag** (Comedy) `comedy.running_gag`
    A structural spine as much as a joke: it is the audience's clock for how much has changed.
16. **The Deferred Payoff** (Emotion) `emo.deferred_payoff`
    Feature runtime plus a plant-heavy form is the one combination where a deferred emotional payoff lands at full weight.
17. **Comedy in Kids' Content** (Comedy) `comedy.kids_comedy`
    The specific rules — no cruelty at the child's expense, the child character wins on competence — that stop four-quadrant comedy curdling.
18. **The Kids' Register** (Voice) `voice.kids_register`
    How a child actually speaks, as against how an adult writer remembers childhood. It sets the whole film's credibility.
19. **The Value Turn** (Scene) `scene.value_turn`
    Boards will redesign your scenes. A scene with a clean value turn survives re-boarding; a scene with only jokes does not.
20. **The Final Image** (Endings) `end.final_image`
    Animation's last shot becomes the poster, the merchandise and the memory. Write it as all three.

---

**The visual kit (ranked):**

1. **Squash and Stretch** (Animation) `anime.squash_stretch`
   The physics of the school being drawn, not an absence of physics. Written out of an animated feature it produces a film that looks stiff rather than realistic.
2. **Flat Cel Shading** (Render) `anime.flat_cel_shading`
   Declared once for the whole film, because an animated feature's look is a production decision made before a frame is drawn, not a grade applied after.
3. **Colour Temperature as Mood** (Colour) `color.temperature`
   Animation states temperature as palette rather than as Kelvin - the whole optical vocabulary is replaced here, and this is the card that survives the replacement.
4. **Layered Background Parallax** (Composition) `kids.bg_parallax`
   The multiplane move: depth built rather than photographed, and the single clearest reason an animated frame reads as a world rather than as a drawing.
5. **Depth Layers: Foreground, Midground, Background** (Composition) `comp.depth_layers`
   Priced by the frame, animation pays for every layer, so the layering is designed at board stage and not discovered in the shot.
6. **Open the Gaps Inside the Figure** (Pose) `pose.negative_space_in_the_body`
   Eight to twelve characters must stay distinguishable at any size, in any light, for ninety minutes. A figure with daylight visible through the gaps in it reads as itself in silhouette, which is the only test that survives all three.
7. **The 180-Degree Rule** (Angle) `angle.rule_180`
   Boards outrank pages in this format, which means the line is crossed or held in the board room where it is cheap, not in the edit where it is not.
8. **Low Angle** (Angle) `angle.low`
   Animation can put the camera where no crane goes, which is exactly why the extreme angle stops meaning anything if it is free. Ration it.
9. **Cut on Action** (Cuts) `cut.on_action`
   Holds in drawn work for the same reason it holds in live action, and it is the cut an animatic can be tested against before anything is animated.
10. **Flat Lighting / Beauty Lighting** (Lighting) `light.flat`
   Ranked here as the thing to resist. A drawn frame defaults to even light because even light is cheaper to draw, and that default is what makes an animated feature look like television.

## Trailer and Teaser

**Constraints:** 2 minutes 30 seconds is the MPA maximum for a theatrical trailer, with each distributor allowed one exception a year. Teasers run 60 to 90 seconds, most on a two-movement shape. Streaming and social cuts at 15, 30 and 60 seconds come off the same assembly, and the 6-second bumper is now a standard deliverable. Sound is off on the first social pass and on in the cinema, so the same cut has to work twice. No new material exists: everything must already be in the film, and the trailer is often cut before the film is finished. The copy cannot misrepresent the film, and practically, an over-promising trailer is punished by word of mouth inside 48 hours of release.

**Grammar:** A trailer is an argument, not a summary. It makes one promise — this is the feeling you will have — and every element is evidence for that promise. Structure is three movements: the world and the person, the disruption and escalation, then the button. The teaser cuts that to two: context, then one set-piece. Rhythm is the primary tool and it is literally musical — the cut accelerates to a drop, holds a silence, then delivers the final hit, and the last three shots are almost always the fastest thing in the piece. Language works by accumulation and triads rather than by sentence: three lines, three images, three escalations. Nothing is explained, everything is asserted. The title card is a beat, not a credit, and the last audio moment — a line, a sting, a laugh — is what the audience repeats to someone else.

**Palette:** 150 seconds max · 3 movements · 1 promise · 3 escalating beats · 1 title card · 1 button · 6s / 15s / 30s derivative cuts

**Rules:** Decide the single promise before selecting a frame | Never show a beat from the last fifteen minutes of the film | Build three movements and let the second one accelerate | Work in triads — three lines, three images, three hits | Put the title card on a musical beat, not at the end of a sentence | Reserve the best single line for after the title card | Cut a sound-off version first and add music second | Never promise a tone the film does not have | Make the last two seconds quotable | Cut the 15-second version from the same spine, not from the leftovers

**Examples:** the two-act teaser (context, then one set-piece), the classic three-movement theatrical trailer, the character-voice trailer built on a single monologue, the post-title button gag in comedy trailers

**Avoid:** Spoiling the third act, which an audience forgives at the ticket counter and punishes everywhere else. Promising a tone the film does not deliver — the fastest route to a second-weekend collapse. The trailer that is a plot summary: an audience that knows what happens has no reason to buy a ticket. Cutting to music the finished film cannot license or afford, which strands the whole campaign. And the cut that only works with sound on, when most of its views will be silent.

**The kit (ranked):**

1. **The Stated Promise** (Openings) `open.stated_promise`
   The entire form. Name the promise in the first ten seconds and spend the remaining two minutes proving it.
2. **The First-Second Hook** (Openings) `open.first_second_hook`
   Skippable pre-roll and silent autoplay make second one the whole negotiation — in a format where second one is traditionally a logo.
3. **The Question Planted First** (Openings) `open.question_planted_first`
   A trailer sells an unanswered question, not a story. Plant it early and never close it.
4. **The Triad** (Rhythm) `rhythm.triad`
   Three lines, three images, three escalations. The trailer's basic grammatical unit, and the reason trailer copy sounds the way it does.
5. **The List That Accelerates** (Rhythm) `rhythm.list_accumulation`
   The second movement is an accelerating list; this is the mechanism that makes accumulation read as rising stakes.
6. **Short, Short, Long** (Rhythm) `rhythm.short_short_long`
   Two hits and a held beat — the cut pattern under almost every effective trailer's final thirty seconds.
7. **The Suspended Ending** (Tension) `tens.suspended_ending`
   The button. A trailer that resolves has sold the film to nobody.
8. **The Scale Reveal Opening** (Openings) `open.scale_reveal`
   The most efficient move in a spectacle trailer: a small frame that pulls back into the thing you are buying the ticket for.
9. **The Title as Thematic Statement** (Theme) `theme.title_as_statement`
   The title card is a story beat here. Land it where the title means something it did not mean ninety seconds earlier.
10. **The Clipped Line** (Dialogue) `dial.clipped_line`
    Trailer dialogue is dialogue with the context removed. This is that operation done deliberately rather than by accident.
11. **Misdirection by Attention** (Information) `info.attention_misdirection`
    The honest way to protect a twist: point the audience at something true, just not at the thing.
12. **Anaphora** (Rhythm) `rhythm.anaphora`
    Repeated openings across cut lines — the device that makes assembled fragments read as one argument.
13. **The Final Image** (Endings) `end.final_image`
    The last frame before black is the poster. In a trailer it is also the call to action.
14. **The Incantatory Register** (Voice) `voice.incantatory_register`
    Trailer voice — present tense, declarative, rhythmic — is a real register with real rules, not just a deep voice.
15. **The Voice Hook** (Openings) `open.voice_hook`
    Opening on a line instead of an image works badly sound-off and brilliantly in a cinema, so decide which cut you are making.
16. **The Sentence That Turns on Its Last Word** (Rhythm) `rhythm.last_word_turn`
    Trailer copy lives or dies on where the turn lands. Last word, on the cut.
17. **The Promise of Violence** (Tension) `tens.promise_of_violence`
    Threat is cheaper than event and safer than showing the event. Most action trailers are built entirely on it.
18. **Familiar Anchor, One Strange Word** (Exposition) `expo.familiar_anchor`
    How a genre or an invented world gets established in eight seconds without a single line of explanation.
19. **The Double-Meaning Clue** (Information) `info.double_meaning_clue`
    A line that means one thing in the trailer and another in the film. It rewards the second viewing and spoils nothing.
20. **Telegraphing** (Information) `info.telegraphing`
    Read this one as the failure it names: the trailer that signals its own reveal is the standard complaint about the form, and it nearly always happens in the second movement.

---

**The visual kit (ranked):**

1. **Cut on the Beat Drop** (Cuts) `cut.beat_drop`
   A trailer is an argument carried by a track. The cut lands on the drop or the argument is being made twice, in two rhythms, against itself.
2. **Accelerating Cutting Rate** (Cuts) `cut.accelerate`
   The three-movement shape made out of duration alone: the rate is the escalation, and it works with the sound off.
3. **Cut to Black** (Cuts) `cut.to_black`
   The trailer's punctuation. It is what separates the movements, and a trailer without it reads as one long movement with no shape.
4. **Wide Shot / Long Shot** (Shot size) `size.ws`
   The world in one frame, once, in the first movement. A trailer that opens tight has to spend its second movement explaining where it is.
5. **Close-Up** (Shot size) `size.cu`
   The promise is a feeling, and a feeling is delivered on a face. The close-up is the only shot in a trailer doing the actual argument.
6. **Silhouette Lighting** (Lighting) `light.silhouette`
   Shows the shape and withholds the thing, which is the entire teaser problem in one lighting decision.
7. **Lighting Change Within a Shot** (Lighting) `light.light_change`
   Buys a reversal inside a two-second cut, which is the only place a trailer has room for one.
8. **Colour Contrast** (Colour) `color.trailer_contrast`
   Built so a shot reads in under a second at any size - which is the real constraint, because most of the audience meets this on a phone in a feed.
9. **Flash Frame** (Cuts) `cut.flash_frame`
   Ranked low and kept low. It is the most imitated trailer device and the first one an audience reads as a template; it also carries a photosensitivity question the piece has to answer before delivery.
10. **Text Safe Zone Planned in the Image** (Text) `textimg.text_safe_zone`
   A trailer is cut once and delivered at six lengths and three ratios. Type placed without the reframes in mind is type that gets cropped in five of them.

## Coverage

Four kits: Feature Film, Short Film, Animation Feature, Trailer and Teaser. Television formats live in `formats-tv.md`; social and short-form in `formats-social.md`.

## Sources

Consulted 2026-09-17.

- [What Is the Ideal Screenplay Page Count? — Greenlight Coverage](https://glcoverage.com/2024/08/29/screenplay-page-count/)
- [How Long Should My Movie Script Be? — Final Draft](https://www.finaldraft.com/blog/how-long-should-my-movie-script-be)
- [How Long Are Scripts Supposed to Be — StudioBinder](https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/how-long-is-a-movie-script/)
- [How Long Should a Script Be? Every Format, One Answer — ScreenWeaver](https://www.screenweaver.ai/blog/how-long-should-a-script-be)
- [Spec Screenplay Page Properties and Script Length — screenwriting.info](https://www.screenwriting.info/spec-screenplay-page-properties-and-script-length/)
- [Special Rules for the Short Film Awards — Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences](https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/95aa_live_action_short.pdf)
- [99th Academy Awards Short Films Qualifying Festival List — Academy](https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/2026-05/99AA_Shorts%20Qualifying%20Festivals.pdf)
- [Oscar-Qualified Short Films Face August 13 Submission Deadline — Indie Shorts Mag](https://www.indieshortsmag.com/news/film-festival/2026/08/oscar-qualified-short-films-august-13-submission-deadline-2026/)
- [How Long Is Too Long for a Film Festival Film? — Stephen Follows](https://stephenfollows.com/p/how-long-is-too-long-for-a-film-festival-film)
- [Page Count for Animation Scripts — John August](https://johnaugust.com/2004/page-count-for-animation-scripts)
- [The Difference Between Live-Action and Animation Writing — Shore Scripts](https://www.shorescripts.com/the-difference-between-live-action-and-animation-writing/)
- [How Writing Animation Differs From Live Action — Film Courage](https://medium.com/film-courage/how-writing-animation-differs-from-live-action-andy-guerdat-3ec5f12c6ac8)
- [Trailers, Teasers & Promos: Lengths, Formats & Tips — Film Editing Pro](https://www.filmeditingpro.com/trailers-teasers-promos-lengths-formats-tips/)
- [What Makes a Great Movie Trailer? The Art of the Two-Minute Hook — Been To The Movies](https://www.beentothemovies.com/2026/08/what-makes-great-movie-trailer-art-of.html)