hailuo-prompting

Hailuo → a sequence of beats, in order

Hailuo animates the order it reads. It has no negative prompt, no shot list and no CFG dial, so every control you get is in the wording: what happens, in what order, and how the camera behaves while it happens. Clips run 6 or 10 seconds (10 s is unavailable at 1080p on Hailuo 02).

Reach it with find_model for text_to_video or image_to_video, then generate_video / animate_image. Those forward only the prompt (and the image), the duration, the aspect ratio and the resolution. prompt_optimizer exists only on the route's own node: find it with search_nodes, read its fields with get_node_info, and run it with run_node.

Write the action as beats

Break one motion into the beats it is made of and connect them with sequencing words — first, then, as, finally. The model animates that order.

A skateboarder rolls toward a handrail in an empty underground car park. First he crouches low over the deck, then he pops the tail and the board snaps up under him, and as he lands on the rail the trucks grind along the steel, sparks trailing behind. Finally he drops off the end and rolls out of frame past a pillar.

Compare "a skateboarder does a trick on a rail", which gives the model the whole choreography to invent and no reason to resolve it the way you meant.

Emotional beats work the same way. "She reads the letter with growing concern, tears well up, then she crumples the paper and throws it" is three animatable states; "she is sad about the letter" is one adjective.

Camera

On the Director endpoints (video-01-director and its image-to-video form, and MiniMax's own T2V-01-Director and I2V-01-Director), camera moves are commands in square brackets. Fifteen are supported:

[Truck left] [Truck right] [Pan left] [Pan right] [Push in] [Pull out] [Pedestal up] [Pedestal down] [Tilt up] [Tilt down] [Zoom in] [Zoom out] [Shake] [Tracking shot] [Static shot]

Two placement rules carry all of it. Commands inside one bracket happen at the same time, capped at three: [Truck left, Pan right, Zoom in]. Commands at different points in the prompt happen in that order:

[Static shot] The chef sets the plate down under the pass light. [Push in]
He wipes the rim with a cloth, then looks up. [Tilt up, Pan right] The dining
room comes into view behind him.

The bracket contract is documented for the Director endpoints only, so on every other Hailuo endpoint write camera direction as prose — "a slow tracking shot follows her", "the camera racks focus from the leaves to her face".

prompt_optimizer

It rewrites your prompt with an LLM before generation. It defaults to true on every fal and Replicate Hailuo and video-01 route and to false on kie's Hailuo 02 routes. kie's Hailuo 2.3, the AtlasCloud routes and the direct MiniMax video models have no such field. Leave it on for a short prompt: it fills in the detail you did not write. Switch it off once your prompt is a deliberate brief — it will otherwise rewrite away the specific wardrobe, the specific light, and the beat order you just spent effort on.

Image to video

The frame is already decided. Prompt only what changes: motion, camera, light over time, environment animation. Naming the subject briefly to anchor the reference is fine — "the red-haired woman turns slowly to face camera" — but a paragraph re-describing the still is a paragraph not spent on the delta.

Keep the framing consistent with the source. Asking a close-up input for a wide establishing move is how you get a hallucinated body.

video-01-subject-reference (and MiniMax's own S2V-01, reached through generate_video_from_references) holds a face across the clip from one reference image; describe the person's action, not their appearance.

No negative prompt

There is no field, and "no text, no watermark, not blurry" in the prompt is read as content. Say what should be there instead. Empty sky, not "no birds". A bare concrete wall, not "no graffiti".

Symptoms

What went wrong	What to change
The action resolves in the wrong order	Number the beats with first / then / as / finally
The camera drifts	Use a bracketed command on a Director endpoint, or name the move in prose
Your specifics disappeared	Set prompt_optimizer false on the route's node
A body appears where the input image was cropped	Match the prompt's framing to the input
The thing you excluded shows up anyway	Rewrite the exclusion as a positive description

Grade the render with analyze_video and detect_video_scenes, and understand_video when you need a written read of what landed.

Adapted from MiniMax's camera-movement contract as documented on the fal Director endpoints, and Akool's Hailuo prompt guide: https://fal.ai/models/fal-ai/minimax/video-01-director/api https://akool.com/blog-posts/minimax-hailuo-video-prompt-guide