Shot design

When to use

Before keying any camera move or composing any frame the camera lands on, and when reviewing a draft's camera. Pair it with song-timing (where moves start and land) and blocking-first (where shots get decided). It doesn't cover lens effects or grading.

Your first attempt will be bland: don't ship it

These are the defaults a first pass falls into. Each one was sent back while making the channel's videos.

• The observer shot: eye level, 2–4 m away, a mid lens (35–50° vertical), the subject centered, nothing near the lens and nothing far behind.
• One axis at one speed: a straight push or pull. Nothing turns, nothing passes the lens.
• Waypoint-and-stop: arrive, hold, move to the next. Or push to a second waypoint in the same place, then pull to a third.
• The stick camera: a fixed offset from a moving subject, so it sits in the center the whole shot.
• Looking down: a high camera tipped 35–45° onto a few people.
• The same size all section: every frame a medium shot.
• Nudges: moves under ~0.3 m or ~10° that read as indecision.
• The slow creeping zoom: a constant slow push-in during every hold. Hold the framing with a slight shake on the beat instead (song-timing).
• Softened words: the creator says "at the edge" and you put it a third of the way in; "close-up" and you frame a medium.

Procedure

1. List the section's beats with their sung onsets and drum hits, measured on the audio (song-timing).
2. Write a shot card per move (shot-card.md). Start with one sentence: "From [start frame], [move] so we [reveal / follow / feel] [what], landing on [end frame] on [word or beat]." If the only verb is "show", the move has no reason.
3. Write a spec for every waypoint, meaning any frame a move lands on or passes its key moment through (Framing below). Put the creator's framing words in literally, using the table below.
4. Variety pass: put the section's waypoints in a table (size, height, side of the subject, lens, the subject's place in frame). Fix any two neighbors that are alike before building anything.
5. Key the moves by the rules below.
6. Probe before rendering (Verify).
7. Look: a frame sheet every 2–4 frames, and every waypoint as a full-size still, judged as a photograph. Then render and watch at speed with the song.
8. Report what each move is for and how each waypoint meets its spec, in the creator's words where they gave them.

Moves

• Something big changes. Across a move, at least one of these changes a lot: shot size (the subject's height in frame ×2 or more), angle (an orbit of 45°+ round the subject, or 1 m+ of height relative to it), or what we know (a reveal). A move that ends near the frame it started on is wasted.
• Two axes, one leading: push + rise, pull + rise, orbit + push, truck + pan, dolly + tilt. Never a pure zoom, or a pure pan from a fixed spot.
• Parallax, always. Keep something 0.5–3 m from the lens moving through the frame (a shoulder, heads, a railing, a wall edge) and something far behind (a skyline, lights). At least one object per move crosses 20%+ of the frame.
• Lens by intention: wide (60°+ vertical) close to the action for energy; long (25° or less) from farther back for compression and intimacy. Avoid a mid lens at mid distance. Never zoom the lens to make something bigger: move the camera, or bring the object to the camera.
• Height with meaning: low for power and scale, level for connection, high for pattern and isolation. Default to near level, no more than ~20–25° down, with the horizon in frame. A steep top-down is a short, deliberate beat.
• Let the subject travel through the frame. It enters, crosses, leaves and comes back. It spends under ~60% of a move in the middle third.
• Reveal structure: start tight or blocked and open up, or start wide and push into the one thing that matters. Put the reveal on the beat.
• Speed is musical: a move starts and lands on beats, speeds up into accents, and slows (never stops) through held notes. One speed curve per move: one rise, one fall, no lurch.
• Never dead: a hold is a slow drift with a direction, or a held framing with a slight beat shake. Dead-still holds are for one or two emphasis beats per section.
• Overlap the moves: the next move eases in under the last one, never stop-start. The direction of travel turns gradually (~10° a frame at most while moving).
• Monotone and decisive: each parameter of a move (heading, distance, height, aim) changes one way. No swinging past a framing and back, and no camera anticipation or overshoot. Turn look directions (slerp); never lerp a look-at point.
• Following shots move continuously: a camera following something never drops to zero speed between moves.
• The shot comes first. Words on screen (lyrics, captions) are placed into the shot afterwards. Nothing about a word may move, hold, slow, aim or shorten the camera. Every rule that did was withdrawn, because they were hurting the film.
• Balance the film: quiet stretches and energetic ones, a spread of shot sizes, mostly near level. A draft that never settled was sent back, and so was the next one, which snapped to everything. The measured balance of the channel's films is in balance.md.

Transitions

• One continuous camera by default. A sequence described as a list of views ("over the right shoulder, then the left, then the TV") is one move traveling between them, not cuts.
• A "shot change" is a fast continuous move: a whip, an arc or a pull-out, with motion blur.
• A world change pushes into a shape. Push in on a shape in the first world (a circle, a window, the moon, a letter's counter). The next world fades in inside it while the push continues, and the shape grows past the frame's edges, so we arrive still moving. A plain dissolve reads as an editing shortcut.
• Going through an object (a screen, a phone, a wall): travel through real geometry along a real path, and show the new place the moment the camera is inside. Never cover the swap with a white flash, a fade or a frame filled by a flat icon.
• Cut only when the creator asks for one, or once the camera has pushed into something until it fills the frame. Never jump cut inside a busy frame. At a cut behind a full-frame push, nothing in frame may change: the subject and its background exist in both worlds, every character keeps its pose, facing and gaze, and the two frames either side of the cut match. Put the cut before a whip starts, not inside it.

Framing (waypoints)

Write one line per item for every waypoint: the beat it serves; the subject and its size; its place (which third, which side); the angle (height, how far down or up, which side of the subject); the lens; foreground, midground and background; what's at the edges.

• Sizes, measured: ECU, the detail fills 60%+ of the width. CU, the head is ⅓–½ of the height. MCU, chest up. MS, waist up. WS, the whole body at ⅓–½ of the height. EWS, the subject under ~10% of the height. Consecutive waypoints differ by at least one size, or by 45°+ of angle.
• Place: eyes on the upper-third line; the subject on a vertical third, facing or moving into the bigger space (lead room of a third of the frame or more). Center only for deliberate symmetry.
• Three layers: at least two of foreground, subject and background; ideally all three. The foreground is soft and partly cropped by the edge, and can frame the subject.
• Lines lead to the subject: roads, railings, rows of people, walls, light beams. Diagonals over horizontals.
• Balanced: weigh the 3×3 grid and make the negative space deliberate. The opening frame and every landing are judged as still photographs.
• Clean edges: nothing important within 5% of an edge unless it's crossing in or out; no tangents; people cropped between joints, not at them.
• Separation: the subject reads against what's behind it by value or color. Look for merges (a dark head against a dark area).
• Level horizon: roll 0 unless it's a flying move banking into a turn.
• One-glance story: at 360 px wide, the frame says the idea without any words. If it doesn't, the frame is wrong.

The creator's words, as numbers:

Failure modes

• Approving camera work from a few stills. Quick 3–8-frame contact sheets passed a flying object stopping in mid-air, a snap onto the subject and a 687°/s whip. Step every frame of the changed shot.
• Answering the creator's read of the picture with a metric. A number that disagrees with what they see is a broken metric until frames prove otherwise.
• Re-staging approved shots while fixing one. A camera round changes only the frames the note names. Before splicing, compare every approved beat against the last approved round at the same frames.
• Sparse keys on an orbit stall where a coordinate turns round. Key along a computed path (every couple of frames), or interpolate in angle.
• A spline key edit leaks into its neighbors' timing. Pin the neighbors' rates and diff the old path against the new.
• The subject lost in its surroundings: never let a crowd or prop share the subject's color around it.

Verify

Run these over the whole scene, not just the changed shot, every round:

• Smoothness, from the camera function per frame: turn rate 90°/s or less; turn change 250°/s² or less; speed change 12 m/s² or less (4 for slow moves); travel direction 300°/s or less; no reversal in any parameter. Faster only on a deliberate whip, with blur. At large scales, measure pace (speed ÷ view depth): 4/s or less, changing 12/s² or less.
• Image speed: project points at the subject's distance into the next frame. Keep it under ~120 px a frame at 1080p, except designed whips.
• Size and place of the subject at each waypoint, against its spec.
• Seen: 50%+ of the subject reached by rays from the lens on every frame it should be in.
• Clearances: no pass nearer the lens than ~0.3 m unless designed, and the camera's path clear of the set.
• Balance: the section's still share, landings and sizes against balance.md.

A turn-rate probe can be a few lines over any pure camera function:

// Flag frames where the camera turns faster than 90°/s (30 fps). cameraAt(f) returns { quaternion }.
for (let f = start; f < end; f++) {
  const degPerSec = THREE.MathUtils.radToDeg(cameraAt(f).quaternion.angleTo(cameraAt(f + 1).quaternion)) * 30;
  if (degPerSec > 90) console.log(`f${f}: turning ${degPerSec.toFixed(0)}°/s`);
}