Directing your agent
The first cut is a draft — how to get from there to the video you meant
Your agent's first cut will be roughly right and specifically wrong. That's not failure — that's where directing starts. You watch, you say what's off in plain sentences, you watch again. Two or three rounds is normal.
The loop
- Watch the whole video once, start to finish, without commenting.
- Go beat by beat and say what's wrong, referring to beats by number.
- Put several notes in one message — one sentence per note.
In beat 1, hold each line longer — I can't finish reading.
In beat 3, the background is too loud, calm it down.
Cut beat 5 entirely.Pacing words
- "Hold it longer" / "it goes by too fast"
- "Tighter" — cut the dead air between beats
- "Let it breathe" — add a pause after a big moment
- "Make the whole thing two seconds shorter"
Motion words
- "Snappier" — faster, more decisive movement
- "Softer" / "calmer" — less travel, less drama
- "Come in from the left" (or right, or below)
- "Less bouncy" — when things wobble too much
- "The background is too loud" — dim it or slow it down
Asking for options
When you can't name what's wrong, don't try — ask for variants instead: "Show me two different openings for beat 1." Watch both, pick one, move on.
Redirect or restart
The one judgment call that saves the most time:
- The details are wrong — pacing, a color, one beat's motion → direct, with the words above.
- The structure is wrong — wrong story, wrong order, wrong number of beats → don't patch it. Rewrite your beat list and prompt again from scratch. Rebuilding structure through comments is always slower than restating it.
Finishing
- "Render the video." — you get an
.mp4in the project folder. - Need another shape? Ask: "Render a vertical version too."