Your Five-Minute AI Film Does Not Need a 15-Beat Structure
A beat sheet built for a 90-minute feature does not shrink cleanly into a five-minute AI short. It has to be re-sized before you write a single scene, not after you have already generated one.
I wrote a beat sheet for a Lost Garden episode the way I was taught: fifteen beats, the full Save the Cat shape, each one earning its place on the page. It read well. It had a clean opening image, a proper midpoint, an all-is-lost moment with real weight. Then I started breaking it into shots and generating, and I watched a four-minute episode try to carry the structural load of a feature film. Half the beats never made the final cut. I had already paid to generate shots for some of them.
The fix wasn’t a better beat sheet. It was a shorter one, sized to the film before a single scene got written....
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