The 5-shot rule: how I storyboard before touching any AI tool

Why five

Five shots is enough to tell a story and few enough to finish in an evening. Establish, introduce, complicate, turn, resolve. If your idea needs more than five to make sense, it is not a short, it is a pilot.

Draw them badly, on paper

Stick figures are fine. What you are testing is whether the cuts carry meaning without dialogue.

Then, and only then, prompt

By the time you open a generator you should know the shot size, the camera move and what changes in each shot.