BUILDING LOCATIONS
A useful location is not a pretty frame. Someone can be blocked inside it, the light has one logic, the camera can see depth, and a later view can repeat the same geography. Slow down here — every shot afterwards inherits these decisions.
Start messy. “A big three-storey farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, red jeep out front, hot summer day” is a fine beginning — it just leaves six decisions open, and something will make them whether you do or not.
Name entrances, the route a person could actually walk, and three depth planes — before any adjective about mood.
Hidden geography is precisely what a later view invents. If the prompt never said where the door was, the reverse angle is free to put one anywhere, and the two frames stop being the same place.
a moody abandoned warehouse, cinematic
a warehouse with a roller door in the back wall and a side stair to a mezzanine; pallets stacked in the foreground, a forklift midground, the roller door and daylight beyond it in the background
ONCE IT IS GOOD, STOP REGENERATING IT
Edit the original, never the edit
Composite each changed patch onto the master file. A second full-frame pass re-renders everything, including the parts you were happy with, and the damage compounds with every round.
Mask the change
An edit model can tint the whole image and flatten gradients while landing the change you asked for. Masking the changed region back onto the original keeps the win and discards the collateral.
Solve once, swap many
This is the same rule the render farm runs on: one solved plate, 72 contractor logos composited onto it. Generating 72 ads would produce 72 slightly different commercials with 72 subtly wrong logos.
WHEN ONE WIDE IS ENOUGH
Sometimes no cut depends on exact off-frame geography — b-roll, a montage, action coverage. There, one wide plate can carry everything, and later crops may invent detail it never showed. Use the shortcut only when that invention cannot break a blocking mark, a later cut, or a continuity claim. The moment a shot has to be repeatable, you are back to the six locks.
These six are not advice you have to remember — they are encoded in the prompt writer, so every frame made in Make already applies them. This page exists so you can tell when a generation broke one, and argue with the rule rather than just obey it.