Your Shot List Was Built for a Human Crew. AI Video Generation Needs a Different Document.
Every film school hands you the same rule of thumb: one page of script equals one minute of screen time. It is repeated so often that most people treat it as physics. It is not. A 2021 analysis of 2,520 produced screenplays by researcher Stephen Follows found the real average ratio is closer to 1.1, meaning the typical script runs about 9% longer on the page than it does on screen, and only 18.2% of scripts land within a tight 0.95 to 1.05 band around the “rule.” Musicals run short on the page (ratio 0.9). War films run almost exactly on the page (0.99). Everything else drifts.
For a hundred years that drift barely mattered. A first assistant director pads the shooting day, the crew adjusts on set, the edit finds the real runtime later. Nobody’s budget depended on knowing, in advance, that scene 14 was exactly 47 seconds and...
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