Resources

Know what to use before you generate.

References we keep going back to. Guides, leaderboards, and research that help you develop an idea and pick the right tool for a shot instead of guessing.

Developing ideas with LLMs

Working with an AI writing partner: explore a premise, shape a scene, and decide what to make before generating footage.

  • No Film School

    Brainstorm film premises and develop scenes

    Prompts for exploring premises, developing characters, outlining a story, and rewriting scenes. A useful starting point when you have a spark but need a direction.

    How to use it: Start here if you have an idea and no shape for it yet.

  • Sean Goedecke

    Practical notes on getting LLMs to generate new ideas

    Lessons from building an idea-generation experiment: focus on a specific problem, ask for concrete mechanisms, and use your own expertise to judge the results. Useful thinking to adapt to story development, drawn from the author's experiments rather than filmmaking tests.

    How to use it: Ask for mechanisms, not premises, and be the one who judges which results are any good.

Production workflow

Turning a story into shots: prompt structure, character consistency, and the passes it takes to get a usable take.

  • Kapwing

    Turn a story into consistent video prompts

    A Bigfoot-video walkthrough showing how scene descriptions become generation prompts. Take the lessons on character consistency, human revision, and iteration into your own project; tool instructions are specific to the featured workflow.

    How to use it: Lock your character description once, then reuse it verbatim in every shot prompt.

  • Storytella

    Write a screenplay AI can storyboard

    Seven rules for scripts that survive translation into shots: describe what the camera sees rather than what a character feels, give every named character a one-line visual description and reuse it verbatim, and make each scene re-anchor its own location and cast. Framed around the author's product, but the rules apply to any generator.

    How to use it: Lock a one-line look for each character and restate it in every scene.

Short-form and social

Hooks, pacing, and scripts for work that has to land in the first two seconds.

  • Louis Gleeson · LinkedIn

    Develop hooks and short social scripts

    A compact prompt sequence for generating ideas, choosing a hook, and drafting a timed short script. Best for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts. Treat the viral framing as inspiration, not a promise of results.

    How to use it: Write the hook first and cut the script to fit it.

Tools and model rankings

Which model to reach for, and where to check before you spend credits.

  • OpenArt

    OpenArt Arena model leaderboard

    An expert-led benchmark for image and video models, scored on the work creative professionals actually do. The ranking panel splits video into Overall, Ads, Film, Animation, Motion Design, Video Editing, and Lip Sync, and image into Overall, E-commerce, Film, Graphic Design, and Image Editing.

    How to use it: Check the Film category before you start generating. Rankings move fast, so treat a score as a shortlist, not a verdict.

  • GitHub

    Open Film Skills: agent skills for scripts, storyboards, and prompts

    Nineteen standalone skills for Claude Code and Codex covering screenplay, directing, storyboards, character, scene, and prop assets, genre looks, and master prompts, with English and Chinese guides. Apache 2.0. A small, actively updated project, so read a skill before you trust it in a real pipeline.

    How to use it: Borrow the asset and storyboard skills as a starting structure, then adapt them to your own film.

Research and further reading

Papers and studies behind the practice, with their limits noted.

  • arXiv

    LLMPopcorn: LLM-assisted micro-video creation

    A study of LLM assistance in making short-form video. Its popularity results use an offline predictor, so they do not establish how the videos would perform with a live audience.

    How to use it: Read the method section before quoting the numbers.

  • Mirowski et al. · CHI 2023

    Dramatron: co-writing screenplays with hierarchical generation

    A system that generates a title, characters, beats, locations, and dialogue in stages so long scripts stay coherent, evaluated by fifteen theatre and film professionals who co-wrote with it. Participants valued it for structure and ideation rather than finished writing, and the paper discusses plagiarism and bias directly.

    How to use it: Generate hierarchically: logline, then beats, then scenes, editing at each level.