Short

Goal: a viewer who swipes in stays to the end and gets one useful or surprising thing.

1. Pick the topic

A good topic has one clear payoff a non-expert gets at once. Check:

• Payoff: can you say what the viewer gets in one sentence without jargon? If the payoff needs the mechanism explained first, pick another topic.
• Something to show: a demo, a screen, a product, a chart. Talking about a thing nobody can see is weak.
• Timing: is it rising now? Is a similar Short doing well for others this week? Use other channels as topic signals only, never copy their words.

Good shapes: news (what changed and what it means, with numbers), a free tool (result first, then how), the future you can see (a real thing doing something new), a surprising founder or company move, a "why does AI ...?" question with one clear answer, a security story (what happened to whom).

2. Write

Title (3 options): benefit or surprise first, with the named product, company, or person. 4 to 9 words. No mechanism jargon. "This free tool cuts Claude Code token use by half", not "Context compression explained".

First frame: the thing itself, moving, with 3 to 6 words of on-screen text. No logo, no intro, no face-only frame with nothing to see.