5 tips for writing better AI video prompts

"Cinematic city at night" tells the model almost nothing about what should actually happen on screen. "A woman in a red coat walks briskly through a rain-soaked street at night, neon signs reflecting in the puddles" gives it a subject, an action, and a setting it can actually render. Vague mood words are fine as seasoning — they're not a substitute for describing what's in the shot.

Most models respond well to basic cinematography language: close-up, wide shot, slow pan, tracking shot, aerial view. Adding "slow dolly-in on her face as she turns" gives the model a specific camera move instead of leaving it to guess, and it's often the difference between a static-feeling clip and one that actually feels shot.

Golden hour, harsh fluorescent light, moody blue shadows, soft overcast daylight — lighting does more to set tone than almost any other detail. Pair it with a mood word (tense, dreamy, triumphant) and the model has a much clearer target than "make it look nice."

Trying to pack an entire story arc into a single 5–10 second clip usually produces something muddled. Models handle one clear beat — a character reacts, a door opens, a car turns a corner — far more reliably than "and then... and then... and then." If you need a longer story, generate it as separate scenes and stitch them together (Vidoro's Story Mode does exactly this automatically).

Few prompts nail it on the first try, and that's fine — it's faster to generate, look, and adjust than to write the perfect prompt up front. If a generation is close but not quite right, use an image-to-video seed frame or Vidoro's edit/continue flow to steer the next attempt instead of starting over from scratch.