Flux3 Video Directing

FLUX 3 Video Directing

Trigger

Any request to write, improve, storyboard, or critique a FLUX 3 video prompt. This skill owns the CRAFT layer only: prompt anatomy, cinematography language, scene/beat direction, and the example library.

Companion — mechanics live elsewhere

Tool selection, rate limits, polling, keyframe-index math, and contest workflow live in the video-generation skill. Load it for generation mechanics; do not restate them here. This skill tells you WHAT to write; that one tells you HOW to run it. (That skill cross-links back here for prompt craft.)

The prompt anatomy (THE template)

The cross-source consensus shape. Write plain prose in this order — the harness is a reasoning model, not a tag encoder, so keyword tricks and word-order hacks do nothing:

[Shot type / camera movement] of [subject] in [setting].
[Subject action over time, with timing beats].
[Environmental motion over time].
Audio: [ambience + event-tied SFX + music direction, or "no music"].
Style: [cinematic style, lens, lighting, texture / film stock].
Constraints: [identity lock, no text, no logos, no extra characters, realistic motion].

The 9 rules (condensed)

1. One clip = one shot. Write a shot direction, not a scene idea: who's in frame, where the camera is, what moves, what changes over time, what's heard.
2. Timing beats. FLUX 3 follows timelines: "0–5s: … 5–10s: …", "after three seconds, a red light begins pulsing", "at the 2-second mark…".
3. Audio section is mandatory (it's on by default — silence must be asked for). Layer it: ambience + SFX bound to visible events with "as/when" + music direction or explicit "no music".
4. Camera language + pace. Use standard terms (push-in, dolly, truck, pan, tilt, orbit/arc, crane, rack focus, handheld, locked-off, whip pan) and add pace + what each phase reveals. For static: "the camera is entirely motionless for the duration; movement occurs only from the subject."
5. Anti-artifact phrasing is standard practice for video — see the tension note below. "One true unbroken continuous shot, no cuts, no morphing", "seamless throughout, consistent characters and world", "preserve face".
6. Iterate one variable at a time. Keep a reusable style prefix identical across clips for sequence consistency.
7. Duration: 5–8s default (establishing/cutaway/insert/reaction/texture). 10–20s only when the subject stays stable and the action has a beginning-middle-end. Don't default to 20s.
8. Dialogue: quote exact lines, name a speaker visible on camera, give voice qualities (accent, pace, "Beat." pauses, tone), "one at a time, never overlapping" for multi-speaker — or let the model improvise from a situation.
9. Split-screen works exceptionally well: "15-second split-screen, two equal vertical halves, one continuous take, no cuts, perfectly frame-synchronized"
   • per-half visibility rules + timed beats + matching rules.

Directing workflow

1. Brief. One sentence: subject, mood, the single thing the viewer should feel. Grounding: research anything with a real checkable appearance and put camera-visible specifics (silhouette, materials, colors, era) in the prompt.
2. Pick beats. For suspense/reveal/trailer work, choose beats from references/suspense-and-trailer-structure.md (8-beat ominous-reveal table + trailer templates). One beat = one clip.
3. Write per-clip prompts with the anatomy above. Pull shot/movement/lighting terms from references/cinematography-vocabulary.md; steal proven phrasing from references/prompt-library.md.
4. Lock a reusable style prefix (e.g. "hyper realistic blockbuster cinematic, anamorphic 35mm, heavy film grain, deep blacks") and repeat it verbatim in every clip + continuation so the world never resets.
5. Generate via the video-generation skill's mechanics.

Two principles to hold throughout:

• Withhold ratio < 15%. The subject is visible for under 15% of total runtime; everything else is evidence and reaction. Imagination out-scares pixels.
• Sound precedes image. The threat exists in audio before it exists visually (wing beats, distant roar, stone cracking). Let the next shot's sound enter before its picture (J-cut) to stitch clips seamlessly.

The negative-prompt tension (read this)

BFL's FLUX.2 image docs say "no negative prompts — describe what you want." FLUX 3 video power users consistently use explicit prohibitions successfully ("no morphing, no timing offset, no extra characters"). For video, the constraint line wins: treat "no X" prohibitions as standard practice. Both can coexist — phrase the positive goal AND forbid the specific artifact.

Failure modes (top 8) + fixes

References

• references/cinematography-vocabulary.md — lookup tables: 15 shot types, 16 movements, 14 lighting terms, 10 lens/DOF terms, each with emotional effect.
• references/prompt-library.md — verbatim proven prompts (flick.art, X power users, fluxproai templates, Runway/Sora/Kling/Veo fragments), each annotated with why it works. Keep source attributions.
• references/suspense-and-trailer-structure.md — 8-beat ominous-reveal table, Derek Lieu 4-act + 30–60s teaser templates sized for chained FLUX clips, pacing mechanics. Makes a creature teaser repeatable for any creature.

Pitfalls

• Don't write a scene idea — write a shot. "A scary forest" is not a prompt.
• Don't leave text/logos ambiguous: explicitly request (quoted, placed) or forbid ("no readable text, no logos").
• Don't pile unrelated sounds — audio mush. One ambience + event-tied SFX + optional score.
• Don't confirm a full reveal for suspense work — user taste is restraint with ONE clear glimpse held for a beat, then gone. Confirm glimpse level before locking beats.
• Don't restate mechanics here; if a rule about rate limits/polling/keyframe indices is needed, that belongs in video-generation.