Text to movie

How to write the text the workspace can shoot

A useful prompt names a person, a place, and a change. Adjectives without an event produce a mood board. An event produces shots.

1. Write one sentence that contains a subject and a change. "The courier loses the parcel" is enough.
2. Add the place only if it changes the pictures. A dock, a kitchen, and a courtroom are different films.
3. Submit that text in the composer. Do not attach a still unless the picture must match a real object.
4. Read the scene cards. If the change you wrote never appears, edit the text and regenerate those shots.
5. Keep a shot that shows the change. Discard a shot that only shows the place.
6. Export when a stranger could retell the sentence after watching.

Prompts that become films

Product text: "A glass bottle rolls to the edge of a wet counter and stops." The film should show the roll, the edge, and the stop. If it only shows a logo, the text was ignored. This is the same job as a product video, with the words as the only input.

Place text: "Fog covers a fishing harbor at dawn and one lamp stays lit." Look for weather and one practical light. Extra characters are optional. The sentence did not require them.

Change text: "A pianist stops mid-scale, hears rain, and starts a slower piece." Three beats, in that order. If the rain arrives first, reorder or replace until the stop comes before the slower piece.

These prompts are patterns, not a gallery of finished MovieFlow releases. Run the sentence on your account. If you already have pages of dialogue, use the script page instead of compressing them into one line.

Picking a model after the text is accepted

Text does not select the engine. You do, per shot, from the models listed on the home page. A painterly wide shot and a literal close-up can use different entries from that list. The compare page is the explanation. This page will not restate every name.

There is no published price for "a paragraph." Generation follows the shots you keep. Open pricing when you move past a test sentence. Do not look for a dollar figure in this article.

Text this page will not stretch

A keyword with no event is not a film. "Cinematic, ultra detailed, 8k" describes a filter, not a story. Put the event in the sentence or accept that the pictures will wander.

A legal document, a spreadsheet, or a list of feature bullets will not become a plot by themselves. Rewrite them as a person doing something. Then submit that rewrite.

If the text is a still you must match, you are no longer in a text-only job. Move to the image-to-video page and attach the picture. Mixing the two without saying so is how the subject drifts.

Rewriting the sentence after you watch

The first pictures are a critique of the sentence, not a verdict on the tool. If you wrote "a woman in a city" you asked for a type, not an event, and the frames will shop among types. Add the event and submit again. Keep a copy of the old sentence so you can see which three words caused the improvement.

Sensory pile-ups are a common trap. Rain, neon, steam, velvet, and a lone violin can all be true and still leave the viewer with nothing to follow. Choose one texture that matters to the change. Let the rest go. A courier in rain who slips is a film. A courier surrounded by five atmospheres is a catalog.

Time of day is a picture only when it changes the action. Dawn matters if the character is late for a boat. Midnight matters if the shop is supposed to be closed and the light is on. If the hour does nothing, delete it. The workspace will still invent a sky, and you can reject that sky later.

Proper names of real brands, real private people, and real news events do not make the sentence more shootable. They make the result a rights problem and a likeness problem. Invent the shop. Invent the person. Describe the action. You can composite a real logo later if you own it, from a still, on the image page.

Iterate in small edits. Change the verb, or the object, not both, when a shot is almost right. If the parcel should fall and it only tilts, say "falls off the table" rather than rewriting the whole harbor. Small edits keep the shots you already approved.

Stop adding words when a stranger can retell the sentence after one viewing. That is the acceptance test for text-to-movie. More adjectives will not raise that score. Another beat will, and another beat is a new sentence, not a longer adjective list.

When the sentence is sturdy, you may still want a screenplay. That is a graduation, not a failure of prompts. Move the sturdy sentence into the script workflow and expand the beats there. Leave this page for the days when all you have is a line.

Notes from a walk, a voice memo you typed up, or a caption you almost posted can all be the sentence. Clean them until one subject does one thing. A memo that says "the bridge, the dog, the argument, the sunset" is four films. Pick the argument if the argument is why you remembered the walk. The bridge can be the place. The dog can wait for another sentence tomorrow.

Constraints help more than encouragement. "No crowd. One chair. She sits before she speaks." Those limits give the pictures a room. "Make it epic" removes the room. If a constraint fights the event, drop the constraint, not the event. The event is the film. The chair was only a way to see it.

Keep a rejected sentence in a note titled with the date. You will be tempted to believe the second wording was obvious. It was not. The note is how you teach yourself which verbs survived contact with pictures. Over a week of sentences, that note is a private style guide, more useful than any adjective list copied from someone else.

If a sentence keeps producing a crowd you did not ask for, name the number of people. "One clerk" is a constraint the pictures can obey. "People" is an invitation. The same trick works for vehicles, animals, and screens glowing in the background. Anything you do not count may multiply. Count the things that would ruin the event if they multiplied, and leave the rest uncounted so the frame can breathe. Then watch once more, specifically for the thing you counted.

Say the sentence to a person in the room before you submit it. If they ask "and then what?", you do not have an event yet. Answer them out loud, and type that answer, not a prettier version. The spoken answer is usually the verb the pictures needed. Pretty versions tend to put the verb back into an adjective. You will feel the difference on the next watch: questions from a person in the room are stricter than questions you ask yourself while staring at the composer.

If nobody is in the room, record yourself asking "and then what?" and answer without looking at the composer. Playback is embarrassing and accurate. Type the answer you hear, then submit that. Leave the recording. It is a better brief than the decorated sentence you almost sent. If the recording rambles, transcribe only the sentence that contains the verb, and submit that sentence alone. Rambling context can wait in the note. It does not belong in the submission.

Questions about prompts