Stream shorts

Shorts from a stream

A stream is hours of one person working with their screen up and a chat beside them. A short out of it is one complete thing that happened in those hours: a question answered, an idea explained, a decision argued. It is not a funny two seconds, and it is not a trailer for the stream.

Who it is for

Somebody scrolling who has never watched the stream. They do not know the speaker, the project, or what was asked five minutes earlier. Everything the clip needs has to be inside the clip.

What a good one is

• A question and its whole answer. The format that works best, because the chat already wrote the hook.
• Or an idea that stands alone: one concept explained in under a minute, from the first word of the explanation to the last.
• It leaves something behind: an opinion, a number, something you could use today. Context with no payoff is not a clip.
• It is better when it goes against what people assume. Agreement is not a reason to stop scrolling.

How it opens

• The first frame is the clip itself with its hook on it. The hook stays on screen for the whole video.
• If the clip answers somebody, it starts just before the streamer reads their message out. About half a second in, the message pops in — drawn the way the chat showed it, over the frame blurred behind it, with a short bubble-burst — and it stays exactly as long as it is being read, then it is gone on the frame. The captions keep running under it: they are the streamer's voice reading it.
• The hook is what the clip is about in two to six words, or the question itself. No clickbait, no shouting in capitals, no "wait for it".
• Never show a message nobody wrote. A hook invented to sound good is a promise the video cannot keep, and the clip runs on the hook alone instead.

The cut

• It starts where the thought starts and ends where it lands. A clip that begins mid-sentence sounds like a mistake, and one that ends before the point does is worse.
• Stumbles go, voice stays. The false start, the sentence said twice, the "um" — out. The way the person actually talks — the asides, the rhythm words, the laugh — stays.
• Pauses are part of speaking. Cut the dead air and the waiting; leave the pause before a verdict.
• Never cut a joke short, and never cut the reaction that follows the punchline.

What is on screen

• Vertical, split: the screen on top, the camera in a corner below. Whatever is being shown is the content — code, a terminal, a browser, a game — so nothing covers it.
• No stock photographs over a screen share.
• The sentence being said is on screen as it is said, with the spoken word lit. Two rows at most.
• Every clip ends on the channel's own card, from the endcard slot. A pack that ships without one ends on the last word instead, which is fine — it is not a placeholder.

What it never does

Music over the voice. A hook that names something the clip never gets to. A clip built out of two moments stitched together as if they were one. Cutting an opinion in half.