Prompting cheatsheet
Camera, lighting, and motion language that lands consistently across models.
Prompting cheatsheet
Frontier video models read cinematography vocabulary. Use it.
Shot framing
- Wide / establishing — full environment, character small
- Full — character head-to-toe
- Medium — character waist-up
- Medium close-up — chest-up; the conversational frame
- Close-up — face fills frame
- Extreme close-up — single feature (eye, hand, object)
- Over-the-shoulder — POV-adjacent for dialogue
- Bird's eye / overhead — top-down
- Low angle — looking up at subject (heroic / threatening)
Camera moves
- Static / locked — no movement
- Push-in / dolly in — moving toward subject
- Pull-out / dolly out — moving away
- Pan — horizontal pivot
- Tilt — vertical pivot
- Tracking / follow — moving alongside subject
- Crane / boom — vertical lift
- Whip pan — fast pan with motion blur
- Dutch angle — tilted horizon (tension)
Lighting
- Golden hour — warm low sun, long shadows
- Blue hour — twilight, cool palette
- Rembrandt — single key light, triangle on the cheek
- Practical — visible in-frame light source (lamp, screen)
- High key — bright, low contrast (commercial)
- Low key — dark, high contrast (drama)
- Backlit / silhouette — light behind subject
- Soft window light — diffuse natural
Motion + pacing
- Slow-motion / 120fps — extreme slow-mo
- Time-lapse — accelerated time
- Hand-held — slight shake, organic feel
- Steady-cam — smooth despite movement
- Static then push — first second still, then push-in
Texture / look
- 35mm film / 16mm film — grain, character
- Anamorphic — 2.39:1 with horizontal flares
- Cinematic, shallow depth of field
- High contrast, color graded
Avoiding common failure modes
- Don't over-specify motion in 5s shots. Models compress motion;
- asking for "running through a forest, jumping over a log, then
- climbing a tree" in 5s yields a blur. Pick one motion beat.
- Subject FIRST, then style. Models read the first 30 tokens most
- closely. Lead with what's in frame.
- One scene per shot. Cuts within a shot are unreliable across all
- models. Use the storyboard for cuts.