# The Motion Prompt Formula

**Track:** Video — beginner → intermediate — Generative AI Video — proposed
**Framework / surface:** ij8 Studio (text-to-video (Wan))
**Level:** Beginner
**Prerequisites:** Animate Your First Still

**In one line:** Cinematography + subject + action + context + style; cap motion.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

A reliable motion prompt reads like a shot list: a camera instruction, a subject, one action, a context, and a style register, ordered so the model resolves them in sequence rather than collision. Capping the number of moving elements is not timidity but physics—diffusion video models distribute a limited motion budget, and competing actions blur into incoherence. The structure borrows from the grammar of cinematography, where a single dolly, pan, or tilt frames a single beat. Restraint produces legibility. Naming the lens move, the subject, and one verb mirrors how directors decompose a scene into discrete, photographable intentions before a frame is ever exposed.