Anatomy of a script

The beat contract, the hook, the chain file, pulls, texture and voice: what a finished script is made of.

The files

Sections of SCRIPT-vN.md (v7 as the model)

0. What the notes asked for and what this version does (specific to v7, which answered the user's margin notes; a new script from the scaffold may not have this section).
1. Packaging: working title and alternates, thumbnail, the promise, the title tension.
2. The spine, the voice, the cast, the rhythm: the thesis, the core loop, the ladder, the persona, the people.
3. Script: the beats. Headings must be ### [Bn] Title (m:ss to m:ss) with n consecutive from 0. Time ranges are written by retime.js from word counts at 150 words a minute.
4. What changed from the previous version, and why.
5. Fact ledger: every figure with source, status and the spoken form (the ledger check finds "14 cents" only if the ledger holds the words as spoken).
6. Claims from the YouTube videos you must NOT use.
7. Open items before filming (every [CHECK] and [V-search] row).

The beat contract

A beat runs 40 to 105 seconds (90 to 260 words) and does four things in order.

Junctions

• THEREFORE: because of what just happened, this follows ("Sales had barely moved and profit had gone. So the owners had a choice.").
• BUT: what was set up is reversed or complicated ("A sensible company stops here. That is not what happened."). Plant the expectation first; without it a BUT is a plot twist.
• BECAUSE: the next beat explains the last, read backwards ("The gate stayed shut. Here is why.").
• Not allowed: AND THEN, next, meanwhile, after that, later, a bare dateline.
• Balance: all THEREFORE reads like a proof; all BUT reads like whiplash. Aim for a BUT every second or third junction. The linter checks the share is 0.2 to 0.65.
• Hinge patterns that work: prediction then check; plant then break; choice then pick; the natural objection; unanswered because.

Care patterns, strongest first for this audience

1. The viewer's own belief or decision ("If your edge is being cheapest, this is you.").
2. A person's concrete loss.
3. Contrast (two statements six months apart).
4. Scale in human units ("about 7 paise for every rupee claimed"; mark derived figures as derived).

The core driving loop and the first decision

From references/opening-protocol.md. The hook has one job: make the viewer need the answer to one question, prove they clicked the right video, and make them expect more than the title promised.

1. Packaging question (Q0). What the title and thumbnail promise, in one sentence.
2. Viewer priors. What a typical viewer believes (Moser Baer: "CDs died because pen drives and the cloud arrived"; "the owners must have stolen it"; "diversifying is what you do when your business shrinks").
3. Candidate loops, 3 to 5, as "You think X. The record shows Y. So what is Z?" Include the generic one every rival asks, to see why you are not choosing it.
4. Score each 0 or 1 on: specific, breaks a prior, lands on the viewer, shape-hintable, unspoiled, deliverable, scalable. Choose the candidate with the most 1s; record the rest as rejected.
5. Destination hint: the shape of the answer in under 20 words, naming a category, not a content. Direction (the route) is the causal steps; every intermediate node goes on a withheld list and the linter fails the hook if one appears.

The generic loop ("how did X fail?") scores badly on "breaks a prior" and "lands on the viewer" by construction, which is why every rival opens on it.

The hook

Three rungs in the first minute

Limits: at most one figure in the whole hook (preferably none); no greeting, channel intro, subscribe request, sponsor or "stay till the end"; 60 to 110 seconds.

A longer hook has to carry weight (B8)

Past about 75 seconds the hook must also hold: a named person with a want (not "its founder" and a pronoun), the weight of the rise and of the fall as images, a stake for "you", at least two forward moments as experiences (a cocktail party, a press conference with one sentence that aged badly) and never route terms, and the learning the viewer will take away. It closes on a question about a person's decision, not a place or an object.

Shape after round 7

1. The mirror: what the viewer has held or done, including the slightly guilty part ("a blank disc, a pirated movie, a college project").
2. The prize: what winning looked like, in the audience's words ("and made serious money doing it").
3. The turn: a contrast word, then the scene of the fall ("But one morning in November 2017...").
4. The person who pays: named, with the intensifier of the cost.
5. The protagonist with a want and his pattern: the named idea defined once in plain words (the pivot).
6. The thesis, landing on the people who pay.
7. The trailer: three fragments, the strongest last, at most 30 words.
8. The takeaway: one short sentence that keeps the "you", at most 14 words.
9. The puzzle about a person's act ("the day Deepak Puri walked away from a business that was working. Why would he?").

The v7 hook is 267 words, 107 seconds. The v5 hook ended on "So let's start with the city he left", which asked the viewer to follow someone they had not met.

The promise ladder

1. Rung 1: the title promise, paid in the first half (by 60% of runtime).
2. Rung 2: the stranger answer, an anomaly the title did not mention, seeded in the hook as a vague specific and paid after the midpoint. Moser Baer: a company that said "we are well-funded" six months before asking bondholders for time.
3. Rung 3: the use, a tool or reframing the viewer can carry out, paid in the close (three questions for any company).
4. Unannounced bonus: a finding the hook did not mention. Moser Baer: the two fraud cases together are less than a quarter of the creditors' claims. It makes the video feel larger than its promise and cannot be called clickbait because nothing was promised.

Never seed a rung you cannot pay with a verified fact. A seed with no payoff was the most common clickbait failure in the teardown (6 of 7 Moser Baer rivals under-delivered their headline).

Anti-patterns

• Stacked numbers in the hook (v3: four figures in 40 seconds).
• Three equal teases with no spine.
• Spoiling the route by naming the mechanism.
• The hypothetical ("Suppose you work at a big company...") unless it bridges into a real scene.
• A cold collapse summary (rejected in both cohorts).

Stakes and load

• Number tiers. Hero: the figure the argument turns on; needs a stake line before it and a comparator with it; spoken once clearly, then reused by name ("the seven paise"); at most 7. Support: attached to a hero, rounded. Drop: goes to screen or the ledger; not spoken.
• Load windows. No more than four quantities in any 30 seconds; no more than one new concept per beat; at most one figure in the hook.
• Shape of a heavy stretch. Early in a beat after the stake line, ending on a plain-language sentence ("That is what a treadmill looks like from the inside.").
• Jargon. Each term of art is avoided or glossed in plain words at first use, preferably by analogy ("recast = ask the landlord to rewrite the lease"). Avoid FCCB, CDR, IBC, NCLT in voice-over; put them on screen.
• Segment and signal (Mayer). One idea per beat that ends on a full stop; a name for the central idea used every time; cut interesting facts that are off the causal chain (the swap test).
• Citing is a cost. Spend it on quotes, arithmetic and contested numbers. Never trade a verified claim for a snappier unverified one.

Pulls

A pull is something the viewer is waiting for without anyone having asked a question. It needs a signal, at least two touches in the text, and a resolution or an admitted gap.

Place them: walk the beats and write for every minute what is the viewer waiting for right now? If the answer is "the next beat", the minute is uncovered. Declare at least four pulls of at least three kinds. Touches are not announcements ("Remember this date" is script-talk). The v7 chain has 8 pulls of 7 kinds.

Texture: persona, figures, people

Added in v6. The plan is the chain: persona, figures, humans, viewer_stakes, hero_numbers[].landing_quote and cdl.hook_elements.

• The beat as a texture sandwich: a person or picture, a claim, a number, a landing.
• The persona. Earnest about facts and people (follows leads, shows its work, honest about gaps, "I couldn't find..." only where a check was made); aloof about verdicts and heroes (gives the case for and against, does not pick sides, never aloof about the workers, no sarcasm at a person). Contested calls get both sides in the same beat.
• The governing metaphor. Choose by four tests (see texture.md), introduce it early, return to it at least three times, say where it stops working. Moser Baer: the treadmill ("a treadmill has a stop button; a bond with a date doesn't"). Add glosses by analogy and one parable with no figures in it (the tea lane, the restaurant queue).
• People. A protagonist with a want, a counterpart, a witness who pays. Moser Baer: Deepak Puri (protagonist), Ratul Puri (counterpart, tagged "Deepak's son" at every return), Mahesh Sharma (witness, tagged "the union's president").

Voice: the tells to remove

The voice pass: mark (run lint.js, read the F lines, read aloud and mark every stumble); rewrite by pattern, not by sentence (if the sentence carries a fact, keep the fact and drop the frame; if it only announces, cut it; if you cut a hinge, move it into the neighbour and recheck C and D); specificity test (replace each abstract line with a name, number, date or quote). It changes how the script sounds, never what it claims; no fact enters that is not in the ledger. Keep the honest hedges.

The chain file, field by field

Full schema: references/chain-schema.md. Top-level keys in chain-v7.json: version, title, cdl, ladder, bonuses, peak_reveal, hero_numbers, jargon, humans, viewer_stakes, persona, figures, pulls, loops, beats, audience, concepts, counted_sets, not_cast, one_off_names.

A chain with none of the K, L, M fields still lints; the rules WARN "not declared" where a declaration is missing and FAIL only when a declaration is wrong. A person is named by name or a name-like alias, never by a role phrase ("the founder"); a re: alias is a raw regular expression.

Worked example: Moser Baer v7

Title (working): Moser Baer: How the Way Out Became the Trap. 14 beats, 3,029 words, 20.2 minutes, hook 107 seconds. Thesis: the founder's playbook (move to the growing market, be bigger and cheaper) worked three times; the fourth was financed with debt that doubled (1,620 to 3,500 crore between 2005 and 2011, sales flat) and a $150 million bond due 21 June 2012, in a market where prices fell about two-thirds.

Hero numbers: 2.5 billion discs a year; as little as 14 (cents); lost ₹79 crore; $150 million; $1 billion; ₹334 crore; ₹1,101 crore. Pulls: P1 motif, P2 clock, P3 jeopardy, P4 gap, P5 prediction, P6 pattern, P7 jeopardy, P8 irony. Measures: 2.0 quantities a minute, at most 4 in any 30 seconds, hard windows 25%, quiet windows 40%, longest hard run 2, longest stretch without a person or "you" 58 seconds, contractions 1.65 per 100 words, 5 comparison markers, no more than 4 new people or organisations in a beat. A fuller profile of v6 against 8 English winners is in page 09.

examples/moser-baer-v7/README.md maps each K, L, M chain field to the sentence in the text that carries it.

Written 2026-10-27 from the repository files and the project memory notes. If a page and a file disagree, the file is right: fix the page.