The document everything else is built from

Why this is the highest-value document

Without a shot list you generate until you run out of money or patience. With one you know how many shots exist, how long the piece is, what each shot needs, and therefore what it costs.

It is not an AI workflow. It is the same document a crew has always worked from, and it transfers unchanged.

A three-minute explainer is roughly thirty shots. Write those thirty lines before you generate anything. On a phone, in a notes app, is fine.

What a line contains

Seven fields, and you can fit them on one line each:

#   SIZE  DESCRIPTION                          SEC  SOURCE   NEEDS        STATUS
s01 EWS   city rooftops at dawn, slow push in  4    gen      -            done t2
s02 MS    Priya at desk, turns to window       3    gen      char sheet   takes 1-3
s03 ECU   hands on keyboard                    2    gen      -            -
s04 MS    reverse, window, light on desk       3    plate    s01 grade    -
s05 CU    Priya reacts                         2    gen      char sheet   blocked

• Number. So you can refer to it in a conversation.
• Size. From the shot-size lesson. Check no two consecutive shots of the same subject are within a step of each other.
• Description. What happens, in the caption style the model responds to.
• Seconds. The intended screen duration, not the generated duration.
• Source. Generated, plate reuse, parallax, filmed, stock, graphic. Not everything is generated, and marking which is which is half the budget.
• Needs. Dependencies: a character sheet, a plate, a composited product, a consent form.
• Status. Where it stands.

Durations, and the number they add up to

Write a duration on every line and total the column. That number is your piece’s length and almost nobody’s first shot list produces the length they expected.

If you are cutting to music or to a voiceover, do it the other way: record or find the audio first, mark where each shot has to land, and derive the durations from that. Editing to a fixed audio length with shots of arbitrary duration is where projects fall apart, because generated clips do not arrive at the length you asked for.

Mark the dependencies

The needs column is what lets you order the work. Shots needing a character sheet cannot start until the sheet exists. Shots derived from a plate cannot start until the plate is generated. Shots with a real product cannot start until the product is photographed.

Sort by dependency and you get a work order:

1. Build the assets: character sheet, plates, photographed objects.
2. Generate the stills for every shot.
3. Check the stills side by side for continuity.
4. Draft-generate everything at the cheap tier.
5. Edit the drafts into an assembly.
6. Final-generate only the shots that survived.

Step six is where most of the saving lives, and it only exists because step five told you which shots survived.

Mark what is not generated

The most valuable column for a budget. On a typical thirty-shot piece a realistic breakdown might be: eighteen generated, four derived from plates, three parallax moves on stills, two filmed on a phone, three graphics.

Twelve of thirty cost nothing to produce. Nobody watching can tell which were which, and a shot list that does not distinguish them quietly quotes generation prices for graphics.

Keep it in a plain format

A text file, a markdown file, or a spreadsheet. Not in a chat window, not in your head, not in a tool’s own project view.

The reason is that this document is also your quote, your progress tracker, your revision reference and your post-mortem. It gets read by you six weeks later and possibly by a client. It needs to outlive whatever software you used this month.

Revise it out loud

Read the list to somebody, or to yourself, shot by shot, as if describing the finished video. Two things emerge every time: shots that do nothing, and a missing shot that the sequence obviously needs.

Finding those now costs an edit to a text file. Finding them after generating costs the generations.

Today: write the shot list for whatever you are making, total the duration column, and count how many lines say generated.