Ninety-Nine Commands Are Really Nine Decisions

Ninety-nine video prompt terms, spread across nine sheets, each one formatted like a command: /cinematic, /droneview, /rackfocus, /goldenhour. It looks like a reference card for a piece of software, and it is an unusually well-made one.

Along the bottom of every single sheet, in the smallest grey type on the card, is the sentence that changes how you use it: prompt wording, not real slash commands.

Typing a slash and a word into a video generator does nothing. These are not commands. They are vocabulary — the words to put in a sentence so the model knows what kind of shot you are asking for. The card is being honest about that, which is rarer than it should be, and it means the right way to read the sheets is as a glossary rather than a keyboard shortcut list.

And once you read it as a glossary, the useful structure appears. Ninety-nine terms is a number designed to be saved. Nine sheets is a number you can actually learn — and the nine sheet titles are a cinematography syllabus with slashes in front of it.

Nine sheets, three layers

The nine sheets, with what each one controls

The first three columns are the card’s own — sheet number, title and item range, with a few of its terms as printed.

You get to use about three of them

This is the part that separates a saved cheat sheet from a usable one.

A prompt is not a shopping list. Every term you add competes with every other term for the model’s attention, and the ones at the end of a long sentence tend to lose. Ask for a low-angle tracking shot at golden hour with motion blur, shallow depth of field, a lens flare, film grain, a warm grade and bokeh, and you will get something that is vaguely all of those and confidently none of them.

So treat the nine sheets as nine slots and fill about three. One from the first layer — where the camera is or how it moves. One from the second — the light, the action, or the subject. And at most one from the finishing layer, if the shot genuinely needs it.

Here is the same idea as a sentence. Instead of pasting /lowangle /tracking /goldenhour /bokeh /filmgrain /warm, you write: a low-angle tracking shot following a cyclist along a coast road at golden hour, shallow depth of field. Three decisions, in a sentence a human could read. That is what the card means by prompt wording.

Three decisions, row by row

Four honest caveats

The card tells you they are not commands, and that is the best thing on it. Most cheat sheets of this shape leave the slash in and let you discover the truth by typing it. This one puts the correction on all nine sheets. Believe it: there is no menu, no autocomplete, and nothing to install.

Vocabulary is not a guarantee. Asking for a rack focus makes a rack focus more likely. It does not make one appear. Generated video is still probabilistic, which means the real workflow is several attempts and a choice — and the thing that produced the clip cannot also be the thing that decides it is good, an argument we made in full in The Thing That Makes It Can Never Be The Thing That Grades It.

Attempts cost credits. Every generation is billed somewhere, and the free allowances on video tools are the smallest of any category because video is the most expensive thing to produce. Decide your three terms before you spend an attempt, not after — the broader habit of knowing which meter you are on is in 100 Tasks Or 1,000 Operations? That Isn’t A Comparison.

Generated footage of people needs saying out loud. Sheet nine is entirely about portraits and subjects. If a video shows what looks like a real person and that person was generated, label it — platforms increasingly require it for realistic synthetic media, and an audience that works it out alone reacts far worse than one that was told.

Questions people ask

Do these words work in other video tools? Mostly, because they are film vocabulary rather than product syntax. The exact phrasing that works best varies by tool, which is another reason to learn the nine categories rather than memorise ninety-nine strings.

Should I memorise the list? No. Learn the nine sheet names and keep the card open. Vocabulary you look up is as good as vocabulary you recall, and the sheet names are what tell you which word you are missing.

Why do my shots all look the same? Usually because you are varying the finishing layer and leaving the first layer alone. Change the angle and the movement before you change the grade.

Is any of this useful if I film with a real camera? Yes, and arguably more so. These are the decisions a cinematographer makes anyway; the sheets are a checklist for planning a shot, with or without a model involved. The same split between what was said and what was shown is why this vocabulary is worth having at all — see The Knowledge In A Tutorial Is In The Part Nobody Said Out Loud.

Learn the nine, not the ninety-nine

Ninety-nine terms is a number built for saving. Nine is a number built for using — and nine is what this card actually contains: where the camera is, how it moves, how the frame is arranged, what is happening, how it is lit, who is in it, what is sharp, what the lens does, what colour it all is.

Those nine decisions were being made on film sets a century before any of this existed, and they will outlast whichever tool you are typing into. The ninety-nine words are just the current way of asking for them — and the smallest line on the card already told you so.

Learning a lot does not make anyone good. Doing a lot does.

If you want a deadline rather than a saved glossary, we run a free challenge — there is no barrier to entry, only a commitment fee that is refunded when you finish. It exists because a deadline makes the shot, and a cheat sheet describes it.

Which of the nine do you never think about — and is that why your shots look flat? Tell us in the comments under the original reel.

More on building a channel for a global audience at mmoyoutube.com.