Adapt a concept for cutdowns

What this is about

Extracted after the fact, those versions are compromises. The short one has no ending, the vertical one has no subject, the silent one has no message. Designed from the start, they are simply outputs of the same shoot. That means building the concept in modules rather than as one continuous argument, and accepting a constraint while writing: whatever the shortest version has to say must be sayable inside its own few seconds, not only as the payoff of the long film. The cost of ignoring this shows up twice — once in the edit, and again in a second shoot day nobody budgeted.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Cutdowns get planned in the concept, not extracted in the edit — the shortest version dictates what the shoot has to capture.
• Modular structure beats a continuous arc: blocks that stand alone can be recombined, a single build cannot be shortened without breaking.
• Every length needs its own ending. A short version that stops mid-thought reads as a technical error, not as an edit.
• Each extra version costs edit time, versioning and often licensing, so it belongs in the budget as a line rather than as goodwill.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Fix the version list before writing anything: which lengths, which ratios, which channels, and which of them run with sound. That list is the real brief.
2. Identify the single statement the shortest version has to land. If the hero film only makes sense as a whole, it will not survive being cut down.
3. Write the concept in modules — self-contained blocks with their own small beginning and end — instead of one argument that unravels the moment it is shortened.
4. Plan a hook for every length separately, because a six-second version has to start where the hero film is still setting the scene.
5. Add coverage to the shot list that only the short versions need: tighter frames, clean product shots, and the key line delivered without its run-up.
6. Design text and branding to work at every duration, including the version where the logo gets two seconds instead of a comfortable five.
7. Budget the family honestly: edit rounds, graphics, subtitles and any music licence that scales with usage across all of the outputs.
8. Agree the approval path for the whole set up front — one round covering the family, not a separate feedback cycle for each length.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Shooting only what the hero film needs, then discovering the short version has no usable opening frame.
• Producing eight versions of one idea when two would carry the campaign, and paying for eight rounds of feedback.
• Licensing music for the hero film alone and relicensing it per cutdown afterwards at a worse rate.

With TillyGen

TillyGen plans the whole family at once: enter the version list and the shot list already includes the extra frames and passes the short cuts will need.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.