**Episode 2 of Act I.** Last time you picked a hosted tool and learned to read the [Artificial Analysis Video Arena](https://artificialanalysis.ai/video/arena) leaderboard. This episode teaches the durable craft underneath every tool: how to actually write a video prompt. The model field reshuffles monthly, but the anatomy of a good prompt survives every swap. **The one idea:** an image prompt describes a frozen moment, a video prompt has to describe change over time. Miss the motion and the model invents its own, which is where that "living photo" drift comes from. **What we cover:** - The eight-slot component model the major labs all converged on independently: subject, action, camera move, lens and framing, lighting, mood and color grade, pacing, and setting. We sort them into a "still half" (what an image prompt would carry) and a "motion half" (action, camera, pacing) that only video needs. - Camera language glossed for people who've never held a camera: dolly and push-in, truck and track, pan, tilt, crane, orbit, handheld, locked-off, whip pan, Dutch angle, rack focus, and FPV; shot sizes from wide to extreme close-up; high, low, and eye-level angles; lens focal lengths (24, 35, 50, 85mm) and depth of field (shallow vs deep focus, bokeh). - Lighting and color: golden hour, blue hour, overcast, soft vs hard, high-key vs low-key, rim light, chiaroscuro, practical lights, volumetric "god rays," and grade words like teal-and-orange, desaturated, and film-stock looks (why "cinematic" alone is too weak). - Prompt structure: front-loading subject and action, and the two dialects (rich cinematic paragraph for [Veo](https://deepmind.google/models/veo/prompt-guide/) and [Sora](https://developers.openai.com/cookbook/examples/sora/sora2_prompting_guide), terse keyword style for [Runway](https://help.runwayml.com/hc/en-us/articles/39789879462419-Gen-4-Video-Prompting-Guide)). Learn the components, translate to your tool's accent. - Specificity vs over-packing: show don't tell, but respect the element budget ([Kling](https://www.atlabs.ai/blog/kling-2-5-turbo-prompting-guide) caps elements; [Seedance](https://help.apiyi.com/en/seedance-2-0-prompt-guide-video-generation-camera-style-tips-en.html) targets 60-100 words). **The copyable workflow:** a fill-in-the-blank template, built up live one slot at a time from "a woman dancing" to a fully directed shot, plus a second fast run on a product shot. **The pitfall:** contradictory instructions (a locked-off camera AND a dramatic push-in), too many simultaneous actions, and tangling camera motion with subject motion. How to recognize it and the durable fix: change one variable at a time, separate camera and subject into clean clauses, avoid "fast," and judge a prompt over several runs, not one lucky roll. Next up: starting from an image instead of text, the keyframe trick, negative prompts and failure modes, and seeds. *AI-generated podcast by OCDevel.*