Story Spine

Each workflow’s own story-design reference owns its archetypes, beat sequences, and frame vocabulary. This file owns four cross-workflow rules about order and justification — the reverse iceberg: lead with why it’s valuable, not with what it is or how it was made.

1. The hook speaks the viewer’s language

The first beat answers “why should I care” in outcome language — what the viewer gains, avoids, or finally understands. Subject-internal vocabulary is banned in the hook: file / function / API names for a code change; a feature list for a product; the source article’s section headings for an explainer. Numbers are welcome only when they carry stakes (“40% faster cold starts”), never inventory (“23 files changed”).

2. Reverse iceberg — value before evidence

The value claim (the brief’s message) lands by the second beat. Everything after it is evidence in service of that claim — the diff, the mechanism, the feature demo, the site’s screenshots. Implementation is the footnote of the story, not the spine.

Self-check on the finished beat list:

• Delete every evidence beat — the remaining beats must still state the value on their own.
• Delete the value beats — if the video still seems to work, it was a feature tour / diff readout, not a story.

Structure is value-first; the voice stays whatever the workflow prescribes (a PR video keeps its plain, no-hype developer voice — leading with value is an ordering decision, not a marketing register).

3. The storyboard is a proposal, not a listing

When Step 3 presents the plan (a checkpoint gate — hyperframes/references/brief-contract.md § 1):

• Open by echoing the strategy line: “This video tells [audience] that [message].”

• Present the frames as a markdown table, one row per frame:

  Frame	Beat	On screen	Why
  01 — Not anymore	hook · 9s	States the old pain and resolves it in the same breath.	Lands the value claim in beat 1

  Why is the frame’s job in the story (from its narrativeRole), traced back to the message — a frame whose why cannot be traced to the message is a frame to cut, not to decorate.

• Recommendations keep their receipts (brief-contract § 3): the archetype choice, the beat count, and any beat the user might question each state their basis.

How to write the storyboard itself, and the storyboard.html page it is reviewed on, is storyboard-recipe.md.

The proposal shape — echo line → frame table → style / duration footer → “approve or adjust” — is the cheapest place to iterate: a frame change here costs 30 seconds; the same change after build costs minutes.

4. Visuals point back to the source

When the piece derives from concrete source material — a PR, a repo, an article, a product page — mine that material for the visual vocabulary before inventing any: its phrases, entities, verbs, and recurring motifs are the props. Each frame’s key visual should be traceable to a specific line of the source, the same way its Why traces to the message: real filenames over generic file icons, the product’s own numbers over invented ones, the article’s own metaphor over a stock one.

Self-check per visual: if the prop could appear unchanged in another product’s video, it didn’t come from the source. Swap it for something only this subject could produce before decorating it.