You can spend two days on a perfect edit and lose 60% of your audience before the third second. On every short-form platform, the opening is not the introduction — it is the video. Here's how we cut for it.
The first frame is a promise
Before anyone hears a word, the first frame has already made a promise about what they're going to get. If that frame is a logo, a slow fade, or an empty room, the promise is "this will be boring" — and the thumb keeps moving. Open on the most interesting frame you have, even if it lives in the middle of your timeline.
Start in motion, mid-action
Static openings die. We almost always start inside a moment — a hand already moving, a reaction already happening, a result already on screen. Curiosity is created by walking in halfway through.
- Cut the "settling in" — get to the point immediately
- Show the payoff or the problem in the first beat
- Use a pattern interrupt (sound, zoom, text) right at the open
Don't build up to the interesting part. Open on it, then earn the right to explain.
The 3-second test
Here's the discipline we apply to every short-form cut: watch only the first three seconds, muted, on a phone. If you don't feel a pull to keep watching, the edit isn't done — no matter how good the rest is.
Retention is a curve, not a moment
The hook buys you the next five seconds; the next five buy the rest. We map the whole edit as a curve of small re-hooks — a new visual, a turn, a question — every few seconds so attention never has a flat stretch to fall off.
Nail the open, then keep paying it off. That's the entire game of short-form. Want us to apply it to your footage? Start a project.