How to Write a Screenplay for AI Video: Format and Action Lines

0:04A screenplay for AI filmmaking gets read twice. Once by people, you, your collaborators, a producer, a jury, and once by the machine, which turns your pages into scenes, characters, shots and prompts. Most scripts pass the first reading and fail the second. In this lecture, you'll learn to write pages that pass both.

0:27Start with standard screenplay format, a scene heading, interior or exterior, the location and the time of day, action lines, what we see, a character name, then the dialogue, sometimes with a parenthetical, and the occasional transition. In Screenweaver's script editor, each of these is an element type you switch between as you write. The format isn't decoration, it's structure the pipeline can read.

0:54Here's our page. Int Thomas's car, night, rain streams down the windshield. Emily, 35, beige coat, burgundy scarf, stares straight ahead. At the wheel, her brother, Thomas, 40, short beard, engine off. He holds an old photo and turns to Thomas. I found it at Mum's. Half a page and everything the camera needs is there.

1:20Write action lines for the camera. Present tense, concrete, visible. Don't write Emily is sad and thinks about her childhood. The camera can't film a thought. Right, Emily stares at the photo, her thumb brushes the edge, tears well up. Every verb is something an actor or a model can perform.

1:42Keep one clear action per moment. A sentence like he grabs the photo, opens the door, runs into the rain and shouts her name is four shots pretending to be one. Video models perform one clear action far better than a chain of them. Split it and each piece becomes a shot you can control.

2:01Name everything consistently. Thomas is Thomas on every page, not the brother in one scene and Tom in the next. The car is always Int Thomas's car. Give each character a short description the first time they appear. Age, look, costume. This matters because the pipeline creates one story element per name. Two names means two characters and two different faces on screen.

2:28Positions count too. Write where each character is and keep it stable. Thomas at the wheel, Emily in the passenger seat. If you don't, the model will happily swap them between two shots.

2:43Write less dialogue than you think. Spoken lines are where AI films most often break. The voice, the timing, the lip sync. So every line has to earn its place. The photo has exactly one line. I found it at mum's. Everything else is in the images. Subtext beats explanation every time.

3:08When you need a delivery note, use a short parenthetical. Quietly or without looking at her. It guides the voice and the performance without turning your action lines into stage directions.

3:22And avoid the unshootable. Inner thoughts and backstory in action lines, camera directions on every line which belong in the shot list instead, crowds, tiny hand interactions, text that has to be readable on screen and objects coming out of containers. When you spot one of these, rewrite it as something the camera can see in a single, simple move.

3:49Use AI for targeted rewrite passes, not for the whole script. One pass, make every action line visual. Another, cut the dialogue by half. Another, flag anything a video model will struggle with and propose a simpler version. Review every change yourself. You're the writer. The AI is the script doctor you can call at three in the morning.

4:13Here's one of those passes, word for word. Rewrite only the action lines of this scene so that every sentence describes something visible in the present tense, one action per sentence. Do not change the dialogue, the characters, or the locations. That last sentence is what stops the AI from rewriting your story.

4:36Once your pages are clean, the rest of the pipeline can read them. Scene headings become scenes. Character names become characters. Places and key objects become story elements with their own reference sheets. That's why a well -formatted script saves you hours later. The breakdown is already in it.

4:56In Screenweaver, you see this in the Storyboard tab. The left panel lists the characters, places, and objects of your story, each with its reference sheet. If the same person shows up under two names, fix it in the script, not in the Storyboard.

5:13Your exercise. Write your short as a one -page screenplay, then run the three rewrite passes, then check it against the unshootable list. The screenplay template is in the resources. That's the end of section two. Take the quiz and in section three, we'll design the look of your film, starting with the visual Bible.