Writing for the first five seconds
Skippable formats protect five seconds. Bumpers finish inside six. Two placements settle their billing at ten. Whatever the format, the opening is what the buyer is paying for, and the rest is what they hope to keep. As of 2026-09-12.
| Second | What it has to do |
|---|---|
| 0 to 2 | Establish who and where without dialogue |
| 2 to 5 | Give a reason to stay past the skip |
| 5 onward | Deliver what the opening promised |
Inclusion rule. The structure short skippable formats settle into. Formats without a skip control are a different case. Order. Chronological.
1The opening is not a hook, it is the delivery
In a format that charges on impression or settles a view at ten seconds, everything after the opening is a bonus. That changes the writing: the thing you need understood has to be understood early, not built towards.
This is uncomfortable for anyone trained on narrative advertising, where the payoff lands at the end. On these placements the payoff has to be legible from the start and the end is where you earn the click, not where you explain.
2Six seconds is one idea with no reveal
A bumper cannot be skipped and cannot build. One idea, one line, one image that carries the brand without a caption explaining it. There is no room for a turn, and a turn attempted in six seconds reads as a mistake rather than as wit.
For generated footage this is the friendliest format in the whole set: six seconds is inside a single generation on every tool that publishes a duration, so there is no join, no continuity problem and no assembly step.
3Sound off is the default and the script has to survive it
A large share of short-format viewing starts muted, and some placements autoplay without sound by design. A script whose meaning lives in the voiceover is a script that does not land for most of its impressions.
The fix is not captions bolted on afterwards. It is writing an opening that is legible visually, then letting the audio add rather than carry. Test by watching it muted before anyone approves it.
4Generated footage has a specific weakness in openings
The first frames are where a model's uncanny tells are most visible, because the viewer is studying the image rather than following action. Hands, eyes and text in frame are the usual culprits.
Practical response: open on motion rather than a held face, avoid text rendered inside the frame, and keep the first shot short. These are craft habits rather than settings, and they matter more in a six-second piece than anywhere else.
5Length beyond the ceiling is a different product
Once a piece needs to run longer than a single generation, it becomes an assembly with joins, and joins are where continuity breaks. A sixty-second non-skippable is therefore a fundamentally different production from a six-second bumper, even at the same rate per second.
Among the tools tracked here the longest single call from a scene generator is 30 seconds, on Wan 3.0 and on the SceneMixer tiers that run on it, which halves the number of joins a minute needs compared with a ten-second step. Pika prices duration in steps of 5 and 10 seconds with a longer route through its frames feature. The avatar-driven entries, HeyGen and Hedra, publish ceilings in minutes and take a minute in one take. Two rows publish no duration at all, so for those the join count cannot be worked out in advance.
6Shape is decided before the script, not after
A vertical piece cannot be cropped into a widescreen placement without moving faces out of frame, and generated footage has no headroom because nothing was composed for the crop. Decide the shape with the placement, before a single second is generated.
If a campaign runs in both shapes, that is two generations rather than one file reframed, and it belongs in the budget from the start.
7Cutting one piece down rather than writing three
The temptation with a sixty-second piece is to trim it to thirty and then to six. It rarely works: an opening written to build does not become an opening written to deliver by removing the middle.
Writing the shortest version first and extending it is the order that produces usable pieces at every length, and for generated footage it also produces the cheapest ones, because the short version fits inside a single generation.
8A short pre-production checklist
Which placement, and what does it settle billing on. What is the shape. Is the whole piece inside one generation. Does the opening work muted. Is there any text inside the frame that a model has to render.
Five answers before generating anything. Each of them changes the shot list, and finding them out afterwards means generating twice.
9Where the sourced rows sit
Requirements belong to the platforms and capabilities belong to the tools; this site keeps them in separate columns and never mixes them in one cell.
- SceneMixer — publishes a 30 second single-generation limit on one model line and 15 on another
- Pika — prices duration as discrete steps of 5 and 10 seconds
A craft note, not a spec. Nothing here is taken from a platform or a vendor, and nothing here should be quoted as a requirement. The sourced material is on published limits. Related: Delivery checklist, Where a series goes.