10 cuts across 2 motion tiers, 80% on tier 2. A short-form episode, published, with every generated clip (10), every source still (10), and the exact still and motion prompt behind each cut.

Every AI video tutorial shows you the prompt that worked. This shows you all 10, including the dull ones.

One published animal bond short — a short-form episode — opened up. The finished film, all 10 generated clips, the 10 stills they were animated from, and for each of the 10 cuts the exact still prompt and motion prompt that produced it, beside the engine tier it was ordered on.

Watch the published cut before you buy: https://youtu.be/aiXKn1Ioya0

Why this genre is worth taking apart

A human hand touching an animal is the hardest thing to generate, and this genre is built entirely on that moment.

Look at which cuts were promoted to the expensive engine. Contact shots are, every time — saving money there costs more in re-orders.

What is in the package

The finished film, as published
10 generated clips — the raw shots before the edit
10 source stills — the frames each clip was animated from
PROMPTS.md — one block per cut: framing, tier, still prompt, motion prompt
production.json — the same record, machine-readable

The routing, in this episode

Cut split: 2 on tier 1, 8 on tier 2. Tier is assigned before a cut is ordered, and it decides the engine. A static shot on the expensive engine is pure waste; a hard-motion shot on the cheap one costs more, because the re-order costs more than the correct order would have.

What the episode argues

An octopus has about 500 million neurons — two thirds of them spread through its eight arms — no bones and three hearts, yet it can recognize an individual human and choose to reach out and trust them.

Three things you can read straight off the prompts

Identity is locked with a positive count, never a negation — a forbidden thing tends to get summoned.
Framing is stated as what fills the frame, not as a shot-size name. Shot-size vocabulary is interpreted loosely by every engine we have measured.
Subject, action and environment are separate lines in the motion prompt. Collapsing them into one sentence is where drift starts.

Honest notice

Clips are re-encoded for download, not delivered at master bitrate. They are reference and working copies.
You may use these files in your own commercial and personal work, including client work, and modify them freely. You may not resell or redistribute the package itself, in whole or in part, as a product — including uploading the clips to a stock library.
This is a record of what one episode took, not a guarantee of a result. Generation models change behaviour between versions, sometimes reversing it, so treat the routing as a procedure you can re-measure rather than a fixed ranking.

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Where this sits

AI Video Prompt Craft — $29 — this episode is one worked example; the pack is the reusable standard behind it
The Prompt Atlas — $49 — every prompt from 83 published episodes, not just this one
7 Ways AI Video Burns Your Credits — free — the seven measured credit leaks, at no cost
The whole catalogue — teardowns, references, skill packs and free calculators, with what each one is for

Teardown — He Dived Into Freezing Kelp Every Day for One Octopus: 10 cuts, film + clips + every prompt