Pick a depth. Each prompt opens in your AI pre-loaded with the lesson. Click a row to preview the prompt.
Before you can write a good short you have to see the skeleton inside the ones that already work — otherwise you're copying the surface (the trending sound, the jump cuts) and missing the structure that actually holds attention. Almost every short that performs has three parts doing three jobs: a hook that stops the scroll in the first two seconds, a middle that delivers the value it promised, and an ending that either pays off cleanly or loops you back to the start. When a short flops, it's usually one of these three that's broken — a hook that buried the point, a middle that wandered, or an ending that just trailed off. Learning to label these parts turns watching shorts from passive scrolling into active study, and gives you a template to script against instead of a blank page.
Take a real, common short: a 28-second cooking clip titled "The $3 dinner that got me through college." Label the three parts. HOOK (0-2s): text on screen reads "This cost me $3 and I ate it every night" while a pan hits the stove — a curiosity gap plus a bold number. VALUE (3-22s): fast steps — boil pasta, crisp garlic in oil, toss with chili flakes and the pasta water, three quick cuts, each with on-screen text naming the step. PAYOFF/LOOP (23-28s): the finished bowl, and the creator says "and honestly I still make it now" — which loops the viewer's attention back to the opening claim and feels complete.
Now see the same skeleton in a totally different niche, a finance short: HOOK: "Your bank is quietly costing you $200 a year." VALUE: three account fees named, with the exact toggle to turn each off. PAYOFF: "do these three things tonight and that's $200 back" — a clean, actionable close. Same three jobs, different topic. Watch three shorts in your own niche and write the timestamp where each part begins. You'll start noticing the weak ones: a short with a 6-second wind-up before the hook, or one whose middle is 40 seconds of value nobody asked for. That noticing is the skill this whole course sharpens.