Test the idea at a tenth of the price

Two different questions

When you generate a shot you are asking one of two things:

1. Does this idea work at all? Does the camera move suit the frame, does the subject motion read, is the shot even a shot?
2. Is this specific take good enough to ship?

These cost wildly different amounts to answer, and most people pay the second price to get the first answer.

A draft (lowest resolution, shortest duration, fastest or distilled model) answers question one for perhaps a tenth of the price. It tells you nine times as much per unit of money, because you can ask it nine times.

What a draft is for, and what it is not

A draft tells you: whether the move suits the composition, whether the subject motion reads, roughly where the clip starts drifting, whether the shot has a purpose in the sequence.

A draft does not tell you: the final quality, whether the face holds at full resolution, or what the finished grade will look like. Turbo models have reduced motion range and weaker prompt adherence, so a draft that looks calm may come back livelier at full quality, and one that ignored an instruction may obey it.

Be clear which question you are answering. Treating a draft as a preview of the final is how people get surprised twice.

The ladder

A typical project moves through three tiers:

1. Idea pass. Distilled model, lowest resolution, shortest duration. Every shot on the list, once. Cheap enough to do the whole list.
2. Selection pass. Full model, working resolution, on the shots that survived the assembly. Three or four takes each.
3. Final pass. Full model, delivery resolution, same still, same prompt, same seed where the tool allows it, on the chosen take only.

The saving comes from the fact that tier one covers thirty shots and tier three covers the twenty that made the cut, at three or four takes rather than ten.

Edit the drafts

The step that makes the whole thing work. Put the draft clips on a timeline and cut them together.

This is a moving version of the piece at a small fraction of the cost, and it does the job the animatic did one level up: it tells you which shots are unnecessary, which are missing, and which are the wrong length. Every shot you delete at this stage is a final generation you never pay for.

On a thirty-shot project it is normal to cut six or seven shots at this point. That is a fifth of your generation budget recovered for the price of an afternoon.

The kill number

Set it before you start: three attempts per shot.

On the fourth attempt you are not allowed to generate again. You must do one of three things:

• Change the still.
• Change the shot: a different size, a different move, a simpler idea.
• Cut it from the list.

Without a kill number, one stubborn shot quietly eats the budget for eight others, and it is always a shot that did not matter. With one, the failure is bounded and the decision is made while you still have money.

The kill number is the single most effective budget control in this whole subject, and it is free.

Fix the still, not the prompt

Restating it because this is where it costs money. Regenerating a still is on the order of one per cent of the cost of regenerating a clip. Almost every clip failure has a cheaper diagnosis one step upstream.

When a generation disappoints, the first question is always “is there something wrong with the frame?” and the answer is usually yes.

The free path

Free daily allowances are exactly right for the idea pass. Spend them on real shots from the real list at the cheapest settings rather than on tests you will throw away, and you learn far more per free credit.

A phone plus two or three free tiers plus an afternoon is a complete idea pass for a thirty-shot project, and it costs nothing at all.

Today: pick your kill number, write it at the top of your shot list, and hold to it on the next shot that fights you.