Week 9: Script and Storyboard

Writing a vertical episode as a beat sheet of states rather than transitions, the three-second hook that opens it, and the storyboard as a shot list with sizes and references attached.

3 May 2027

Phase 3 has covered three separate ways of holding a shot steady: your own workflow, a locked reference, and a scene master plate. This week is where those three get organised into something long enough to call an episode — a beat sheet, a hook, and a storyboard that turns both into a shot list the production phase can actually run.

States, not transitions

A beat sheet works best written as a sequence of states — what is true at this point in the story — rather than a sequence of transitions describing how one moment turns into the next. “The rival arrives uninvited” is a state; “then things get tense” is a transition describing a feeling rather than naming anything a shot could show. A beat sheet written entirely in states gives a storyboard something concrete to draw; one written in transitions leaves the storyboard guessing at what actually needs to be on screen.

The three-second hook

A vertical episode is watched thumb-first, and a viewer’s default action is to keep scrolling. TikTok publishes two windows for the opening of a video on its own feed: “Prioritize your hook in the first 6 seconds to boost engagement and increase watch time”, and “Introduce your content proposition in the first 3 seconds for better recall and awareness”. Two windows, not one — and the inner one is the one this course plans to, which is what “the three-second hook” means here. Not that the hook is finished by then, but that by then the opening has said what it is.

Both numbers come with conditions. This is advertising guidance about a feed, not a finding about drama — though the feed is where a vertical episode lands either way. And a published window is not a target: nothing good happens because a hook finished at 2.9 seconds. What the two numbers settle is the order of business, which is the part worth keeping — the proposition first, then the rest of the hook.

Source: TikTok Ads Manager Help, creative best practices — https://ads.tiktok.com/help/article/creative-best-practices

That is the room's rule at Dailies: everyone decides before a word is said.

This course sorts cold opens into four devices — its own sorting, not a published taxonomy: a mystery hook showing a consequence without its cause, a conflict-in-progress hook starting mid-argument, a visual-anomaly hook putting something wrong in frame before anything explains it, and a direct-address hook speaking straight to camera. Pick one on purpose — a shot trying to be all four earns none of them, and the hook is the first state on the beat sheet, not an afterthought bolted onto it.

The Cut makes this move on four real recorded clips: drop the establishing shot, open on the hook instead, and watch what actually changes.

The storyboard as a shot list

A storyboard for this course is not a drawing exercise; it’s a shot list with a size and a reference attached to each entry — which reference sheet or master plate that shot checks against, and roughly how close the frame is. A board that only shows composition without naming its reference is a set of pictures, not a production document; whoever shoots from it later needs to know which locked asset each panel is supposed to match.

The ladder

The ladder this week runs four tiers, each covering the same two-to-three-shot sequence. The lowest tier is a prose paragraph describing what happens, with no shot breakdown at all. The next tier turns that paragraph into a beat sheet written in states. The next tier adds a shot list to the beat sheet, with a size named for every shot. The top tier boards the sequence with actual keyframes, each one tagged with the reference material it has to match.

  1. 1prose
  2. 2beat sheet
  3. 3beat sheet + shot list
  4. 4storyboard (+ 3 frames)

prose

Prose leaves the order of events to the model: check whether the fire really comes after the fall.

beat sheet

Beats give each moment a result state: watch 0-4 s for 'down in the water, hand on the stake'.

beat sheet + shot list

The shot list fixes size and angle: 4-7 s should be a close-up on the hand, and the cuts should land on 4.0 and 7.0.

storyboard (+ 3 frames)

Three attached frames on top of t3: check the torch in S9 and the profile in S10 against the boards.

Recorded on the convener's rig with MiniMax H3 (local weights), keyframes with NoobAI-XL, reference stills for The Ninth Head with ChatGPT's image generator. Nothing is generated in the browser. Run it in the Studio.

Before class

Sketch, in a few lines, the premise your storyboard will cover — the prose-paragraph tier of this week’s ladder.

This week’s exercise

Turn that paragraph into all four ladder tiers for the same two-to-three shot sequence: the paragraph itself, a beat sheet in states, a beat sheet with a sized shot list, and a boarded version with keyframes tagged to their references. Bring all four tiers to Wednesday’s Dailies.

Reading

Teaching team