Glossary
The language of short documentaries.
Plain-English definitions of the words we use to research, write and make short videos.
A
AnimaticAn animatic is a storyboard laid out in time, with each picture held for as long as its shot will last and set against the narration or a rough soundtrack.Archival footageArchival footage is film, video, photographs, audio or documents recorded in the past and kept in a collection, used in a new work to show what really happened.Aspect ratioAspect ratio is the shape of a video frame, written as width to height. 16:9 is the wide frame of a TV, and 9:16 is the tall frame of a phone held upright.Audience retentionAudience retention measures how much of a video people actually watch, usually shown as a line of how many viewers are still watching at each moment.
B
C
Character consistencyCharacter consistency means a person in a video looks recognizably the same in every scene: the same face, build, hair, clothing and age.Cold openA cold open starts a video in the middle of the action, before any title, introduction or context, and explains how we got there afterward.Content repurposingContent repurposing turns one finished piece into new pieces, such as a shorter cut, a clip of one moment or a still post, so the same work reaches more people.Cross-platform publishingCross-platform publishing means releasing the same video on several platforms, adapted to each one's frame, interface, length and audience.
D
F
H
HookThe hook is the opening moment of a video, usually its first few seconds, that gives a viewer a reason to keep watching.Human in the loopHuman in the loop means a person reviews and approves an AI system's work at set points before it moves on, instead of letting it run from start to finish on its own.
I
K
M
P
PacingPacing is the speed at which a video moves: how quickly new information arrives, how long each shot stays on screen, and how fast the narrator speaks.Pan and tiltA pan turns the camera left or right from where it stands; a tilt turns it up or down. Neither moves the camera through space.Parallax animationParallax animation creates a sense of depth in a flat picture by splitting it into layers and moving the near layers faster than the far ones.PayoffA payoff is the moment a story delivers on something it set up earlier: the answer to the opening question, the result of a risk, or the meaning of an early detail.
R
S
Safe zoneA safe zone is the part of a video frame that a platform's buttons, captions and labels are unlikely to cover, where faces and important text should go.Short-form videoShort-form video is brief, usually vertical video made to be watched on a phone, in feeds such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.Shot compositionShot composition is how the people, objects, space and light inside a frame are arranged, which decides where the viewer looks first and how a shot feels.Story beatA story beat is one step in a story where something changes: a new fact, a turn, a decision or a reveal. A short video is a chain of beats.StoryboardA storyboard is a series of pictures that shows a video scene by scene before it is made, with notes on what happens, what is said and how the camera moves.
T
Temporal consistencyTemporal consistency is how steady a video stays from one frame to the next, with faces, objects, text and light keeping their shape instead of flickering or morphing.Text-to-videoText-to-video is a kind of AI that makes a short moving clip from a written description alone, such as a scene, an action and a camera move.Tracking shotA tracking shot moves the camera along with a moving subject, beside, ahead of or behind it, keeping the subject in frame as it travels through a place.
V
All 30 terms.