Guide · Director craft

How to Design a PMV Intensity Arc

An intensity arc is the planned shape of energy across a whole PMV. It decides where the edit rises, holds, pulls back, returns, and finally spends what it has been saving.

You usually discover the need one drop too late. The first chorus already contains everything you were excited to use, and the second half has nowhere to go. Cutting faster does not fix it. You spent the reveal, motion, close framing, and rare footage together.

An arc is not one line labeled intensity. It is a set of phase contracts. Each phase has one job and its own working ranges for cut cadence, visual motion, framing or reveal, and rarity.

Start with a verified beat grid. Then decide what each large section must do.

Mark the structural arrivals

Zoom out until you can see the song as sections rather than individual beats. Mark every audible turn that changes the material you have to direct: drums enter, the vocal strips back, a hook returns, the bass drops out, the final run begins.

Use plain language before labels such as verse or chorus. Drums enter tells you what changed. Chorus only names the section.

Current Final Cut Pro documentation makes the same useful distinction in its own timeline: song parts are major transitions or structural changes, while bars and beats are smaller timing levels.^[1] The feature is product-specific. The planning principle is tool-agnostic. Build the arc from the large audible changes, not from every available grid line.

Your first board only needs four columns:

Continue through the track without assigning intensity. First prove the boundaries belong to the music.

Give each phase one job

A musical section tells you where a phase can begin. The phase job tells you why it exists.

Use a verb that describes what must be different by the end:

• Orient: establish the visual world and the first pattern.
• Invite: deepen the session without spending its rarest material.
• Accelerate: increase one or more controls before an arrival.
• Withhold: keep the session charged while refusing the expected escalation.
• Reset: open enough contrast for another run.
• Return: bring back a pattern with a meaningful change.
• Pay off: spend the material and reveal budget the earlier phases protected.

These are working verbs, not official arc types. Rename them when the track needs better language. Keep one main job per phase.

Do not let the song label choose the job for you. A chorus can withhold. A breakdown can keep explicit footage on screen. A final verse can pay off the promise that the first drop deliberately left open. Verse = low and chorus = high produce a diagram of the song, not a direction for the session.

Write the job beside every section, then finish this sentence:

By the end of this phase, the edit has ______.

Gotten more intense is unfinished. Introduced the close-framing pattern without using the final reveal is testable.

Set four independent controls

The phase job becomes usable when you give it four control ranges. This is Kira's phase-contract board, a working method for making the arc visible before the timeline fills.

Cut cadence

Cadence is the phase's normal shot-length range. Express it in beats when the grid is stable: mostly four-beat holds, a two-beat run at the exit, one brief one-beat burst.

Cadence sets the local operating range. The later cut pass decides which musical and visual events earn a boundary.

Visual motion

Motion describes what is already happening inside the selected footage. A slow closeup and a fast wide shot can carry different energy even when both hold for four beats.

Use low, working, and high as comparisons inside this edit, not measurements of the performer or viewer.

Framing and reveal

Track proximity, detail, explicitness, and new visual information together only when they serve one planning decision. A phase can move from wide to close framing. It can preserve one full reveal for the exit. It can keep explicit material while simplifying the composition during a reset.

Explicitness is one control, not the arc itself. If every escalation means showing more, the edit runs out of direction as soon as it reaches the most explicit clip.

Rarity

Rarity is the amount of your strongest, least repeated, or most specifically desired material the phase may spend. This is where a tagged clip library becomes part of directing. The energy and framing tags tell you what can feed the contract. Your own judgment tells you which ranges are A-tier and which ones can carry ordinary work.

Give each phase a budget: no A-tier clip, one anchor, spend one and reserve two, final material available. Rarity protects somewhere for the session to go.

Four controls expose the choice hidden inside make it build. Increase one. Hold another. Pull a third back. Save the fourth.

Place the anchors first

Do not fill the empty spaces yet. Place the moments the session cannot afford to improvise:

1. the first unmistakable statement of the visual idea
2. the first meaningful reveal
3. the first false peak or withheld expectation
4. the deepest reset
5. the return of a pattern with a change
6. the final payoff
7. the final readable image.

An anchor is not automatically a cut. It is a promise about what the viewer will perceive at that point. A reveal might complete on a drop after its incoming shot begins earlier. A repeated pose might return on a vocal entrance without changing performers. The phase board reserves the moment. The later sync pass decides how the moment lands.

Premiere currently lets an editor mark source clips and the sequence timeline separately.^[2] Use your editor's equivalent. Name anchors by job, not marker 12.

If the first peak holds all three of your best anchors, move at least one. The ending needs something the opening did not spend.

This planning is more coordination than it should be. We wish it were more fun and less complicated. That is part of why we are building Kira. Kira is under development, so it cannot build this PMV for you today. The phase-contract method works now, in the editor you already use.

Build a complete phase contract

Here is one complete board for a fixed-tempo 3:04 track at 120 BPM in 4/4. At that tempo, one beat lasts 0.5 seconds and one four-beat bar lasts 2 seconds. The arithmetic is fixed. The phase choices are one worked example, not the correct arc for every song.

The first peak raises motion, tightens framing, spends one rare clip, and permits a short fast run. It refuses to max every lane at once.

The withhold phase does not become non-erotic. Explicit material can stay on screen while the cuts lengthen, the framing simplifies, and the rarest ranges disappear. That gives the return something visible to restore.

The 48-second payoff varies inside its range and saves the fastest run for the final arrival. A long phase needs internal shape too.

Most importantly, the board never says which beat receives a cut. It tells the fine-cut pass what the phase must accomplish, which ranges are allowed, and which anchors are protected. Macro direction is set. Micro selection is still open.

Test the rough cut

Fill the gaps with a rough pass, then test the board three ways. Do not polish transitions or frame offsets yet. You are testing the plan.

Run the silhouette test

Draw the four control lanes as rough steps. If every line stays in the same band, the treatment is flat. If all four climb together from the opening, the first half is consuming the second half's options.

The reason contrast matters is simple at the craft level: a return needs something different to return from. The silhouette makes that difference inspectable without pretending it measures arousal.

Run the mute test

Watch the rough picture without sound. Can you see the treatment change at the intended phase boundaries? A move from wide to close framing should read. A rarity reset should remove the special material. A return should bring back a recognizable pattern with one changed axis.

Mute testing does not judge musical sync. It asks whether the visual plan exists without the track explaining it for you.

Run the audio-only test

Listen while reading the phase jobs. Does accelerate begin where the arrangement starts to gather? Does withhold sit on a real pullback or a deliberate mismatch? Does pay off begin at an arrival strong enough to carry the reserved material?

If the job changes in the middle of an audible section, either move the boundary or write a better reason for the exception. The board should come from the track, not sit on top of it.

Then play picture and sound together. The combined pass is where taste decides whether the contract works.

Repair the board, not the symptom

The edit feels flat

Find the lane that never changes. Do not add random faster cuts. Change one phase job or one control range, then replay the boundary on both sides.

If every phase says build, the jobs are the problem. A staircase with no landing is still one repeated instruction.

The first drop beats the ending

Check rarity and reveal before cadence. The first drop probably spent material the payoff needed. Move one A-tier anchor later, then let the first peak win through motion, pattern, or a shorter local run.

The first peak should make a statement. It does not need to close the argument.

The quiet section dies

You reduced every lane at once. Restore one source of charge: explicitness, eye contact, internal motion, close framing, or a repeated motif. A reset changes the rules. It does not empty the screen.

The graph rises perfectly and feels mechanical

Break the diagonal. Hold one phase. Return to a previous pattern. Let one control fall while another rises. Use a withhold job where the song seems to promise an obvious escalation.

An arc is a pattern of changes, not proof that every line points up.

When the board survives those tests, return it to the complete PMV workflow. You now know the job of every phase, the ranges each one can use, and the moments the edit must protect.

The next pass chooses the individual sounds, motions, and boundaries that fulfill those contracts. The board directs the session. It does not make the cuts for you.