Hook for a generated video: what must be in frame 1 when a model draws it
The first-frame rules for Veo, Kling and Runway: start mid-action, name the motion already happening, keep text out of the generation, and generate the hook shot as its own 4-second prompt first.
Write the hook shot for a generated short video about {topic}, as a standalone 4-second generation prompt. The viewer decides on frame 1 (about 0.1 to 0.5 s for younger audiences, 1 to 2 s for older ones, per the creator-growth skill), so the hook shot is generated separately, judged at thumbnail size, and only then is the rest of the video made. Frame 1 rules for a model: - The subject is already in frame at full size and already mid-action: 'a hand already lifting the lid', not 'a hand reaches for the lid'. Models ramp motion from a still; write the action as in progress. - One strong motion that reads at thumbnail size: steam, pouring, a door opening, a page turning, a cursor moving. Name it; do not ask for 'dynamic'. - Close-up or medium close-up. Wide shots have nothing to look at in 0.5 s. - Light from one named side so there is a bright and a dark half; flat light reads as a render. - No on-screen text, no logos, no subtitles in the generation; the hook text is added in the editor in the platform font, so it stays sharp and editable. - 4 seconds, 9:16, the camera static or a slow push in. No orbit, no whip pan on the hook shot. Write the hook shot in this shape: subject already {mid-action}, {setting}, {medium close-up / close-up}, {static / slow push in}, {light from one side}, {style}, {ambient sound}, 4 seconds, 9:16, no on-screen text, no logos. Then: the hook TEXT line to add in the editor (max 7 words, upper third), and a 2-line note on what to check at thumbnail size before generating the other shots (is the motion visible, is the subject identifiable, does the bright half hold the subject). Topic: {topic} What the first second must show: {the subject and the motion}
Paste into the video model as one paragraph; remove the labels once you are happy with the content.
Example
Topic: a weeknight cooking channel, a 4-minute smash burger. First second: the ball of meat hitting the pan.
Hook shot: A ball of ground beef already hitting a hot cast-iron pan, fat already spitting, a steel spatula entering from the right. A home kitchen hob, close-up, camera static at pan level. Hard light from a window on the left, the right half of the pan in shadow. Clean handheld-phone look, true-to-life colour, light steam. Loud sizzle, no music. 4 seconds, 9:16. No on-screen text, no logos.
Editor text: ‘4 MIN. ONE PAN.’ in the upper third, from frame 1.
Thumbnail check: the spatter must be visible at 150 px wide (if not, move the camera closer); the patty must be in the bright left half; if the model opens on an empty pan, add ‘already’ before every verb and shorten to 3 seconds.
Second hook variant, for A/B: A pair of hands already pressing a spatula flat onto a patty, the edge crisping, same pan, same light, extreme close-up. Editor text: ‘DON’T TOUCH IT FOR 2 MIN.’
Tips
- Generate the hook shot first and alone. If it fails at thumbnail size, the other seven shots were wasted money.
- 'Already' is the word that moves a model off the still frame: 'already pouring', 'already rising', 'already open'.
- Use the first-frame method from the generation category when the hook needs an exact composition: make the still, approve it at thumbnail size, then animate it.
| works with | Veo: Google text-to-video / image-to-video prompts. · Kling: Kling text/image-to-video prompts. · Runway: Runway Gen prompts and camera controls. · Image models: Midjourney, Flux, Imagen: keyframes and style boards for image-to-video. · Any LLM: Model-agnostic: Gemini, Mistral, a local model. |
| cost | Free. The video or image model you paste it into has its own pricing. |
| status | Unverified: written from the technique, not yet run end to end by us. |
| license | CC BY 4.0 for the text here; skills are MIT. |
| updated | 2026-11-01 |
| for agents | generated-video-first-frame-hook.md |
Related
Visual hook rules: first frame, text on screen, sound off, and how long you have
The checklist for what the viewer sees before any word is heard: first frame, text, the sound-off case, and the attention windows the creator-growth skill states (about 0.1 s, 0.5 s, 1-2 s by age).
Image-to-video: generate the first frame, then animate it
Make a still with an image model first, fix the composition there, and only then ask the video model to animate it. Cheaper iterations and the look you chose, not the one the video model guessed.
Camera movement vocabulary that video models understand
The 14 camera moves that generation models respond to reliably, with the phrasing that works and the phrasing that produces a wobbling mess.
The 7-part prompt structure for text-to-video
A fill-in template that gives any video model the seven things it needs: subject, action, setting, camera, light, style and sound. Fewer vague words, fewer wasted generations.
Keep the same character across clips: the reference sheet prompt
A character description block you reuse verbatim in every prompt, plus a generated reference sheet, so a face, outfit and build stay the same from shot to shot.
Generate 20 hooks for a topic and rank them by a stated rubric
One prompt that produces 20 openers across the 8 archetypes, scores each on four named criteria, and returns the top 5 with the score shown, so the ranking can be argued with instead of trusted.