storyboarding-beat-generatorlisted

# Storyboarding Beat Generator A reusable beat generator for the **Storyboarding as Choreography** curriculum. Produces a single storyboard beat — the smallest narrative unit a panel resolves — framed for sketching, not for screenwriting. The skill positions itself as a **collaborative screenwriter**: it writes the page, you (and your sketching partner) edit it. The generated beat reads cleanly first; refinement comes after. ## What a beat is here The unit smaller than a scene and smaller than a screenwriter's beat. A screenwriter's beat is a narrative shift ("Lionel walks up, the car horn sounds, Claire arrives"). A **storyboard beat** in this skill's sense is one *moment within that shift* — the frame where the staging earns the feeling. A well-formed beat has two parts: - **The image** — 1–3 lines of present-tense action-line prose, presented in a screenplay-style action block. Only what can be seen and heard. No internal thoughts, no "she feels." - **The shift** — a single-line annotation naming what changes between the start and end of the moment. **The shift is a margin note, not a tagline.** It belongs to the same tradition as ekonte left-column annotations, screenplay margin notes, and a storyboard artist's scribble next to a panel. It is *the thinking about the frame, sitting next to the frame*. It should never drift toward summary, caption, or punchline. That's it. Composition, framing, and camera are the participant's job — the skill should not prescribe the