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2026-06-12 · 5 min read
On Shorts, Reels and TikTok, viewers decide whether to keep watching in roughly two seconds. Everything else — your visuals, your story, your editing — only matters if the hook earns those two seconds. Here are the formulas that work, with examples you can adapt.
State the most surprising fact or outcome first, with zero warm-up. Not "Today we will talk about saving money" but "That 500-rupee lunch you grab without thinking? Over ten years it quietly eats nine lakh." Lead with the number, not the lecture.
Raise a question the viewer can only answer by watching to the end. "Everything in this house looks normal — except one thing nobody noticed for eleven years." The brain hates unresolved loops; close it only in the final scene.
Start inside the most intense moment, not before it. A story that begins "She froze, hand still hovering over the phone screen" beats one that begins with where she was born. Pull your climax-energy moment forward.
Your first frame is competing with everything else on the feed. Make scene 1 the most dramatic, extreme image your story has — never a calm establishing shot. Bright contrast, a face in tension, something visibly wrong: these stop thumbs.
ClipNova's script engine writes hook-first by design: every generated short opens with a pattern interrupt and pulls the most dramatic visual into scene 1. Generate a free short and check its first two seconds against this list.
Create a free AI video →