The board is the source of truth for the edit. Every image, clip and cut comes from a row of it, and the owner approves it before anything is made.
One row per shot
Each shot has a start and an end on the beat map, its section, the lyric lines it owns, the set, the framing, one sentence of action, its kind (sung, acted or a still) and whether she is on screen.
s016 · 0:40.9 to 0:45.6 · chorus 1 · sung · medium close-up set the main street at night action she sings the chorus to the lens in the middle of the street, neon glowing behind her
The action is one sentence a camera can shoot: who, does what, where. "She feels hope" is not an action. "She answers with a slow small smile and touches the brim of her hat" is.
Cut on the beat
The cut points were written by hand, then snapped to the nearest measured beat when one was within 0.12 seconds. The tempo drifts, so a fixed BPM grid would slide off the music by the second chorus. Shots run from 2.4 seconds in the verses to 7.6 seconds on a chorus line.
Framing
| Framing | Images | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Extreme wide (EWS) | 24 | The town, the desert, the tower: where we are |
| Wide (WS) | 59 | Her in a crowd or a street |
| Medium (MS) | 112 | Most of the story: what she does |
| Medium close-up (MCU) | 73 | Most sung shots |
| Close-up (CU) | 43 | A look, a coin in her hand, a last chorus line |
| Extreme close-up (ECU) | 12 | A detail: the nameplate, an eye |
Who is on screen
She is on screen in 29 of La última moneda's 33 shots. The other 4 are the hover coach in the desert, the wheel of fortune, the tower erupting with coins and the town at sunset: they say where we are or what just happened. The toolkit's floor is 70% of shots with the lead.
The story, section by section
| Section | What happens in La última moneda |
|---|---|
| Intro | She steps off a hover coach with her last gold coin and walks down the street to the saloon. |
| Verse 1 | Inside, prospectors crowd the screens and a table of coins. She puts her last coin on the counter and gets an old brass key. |
| Pre-chorus | The big screen turns red and the saloon laughs at her. She smiles, touches her hat and walks out. |
| Chorus 1 | She sings in the street, in front of the red screen and in the mine cage going down. She rides a mine cart and sings at a wall with gold veins. |
| Verse 2 | She strikes gold, reads the ticker tape and wakes the miners' camp. They stack their hands on hers and ride out. |
| Chorus 2 | She sings at the mine at dawn. The tower erupts with coins; she sings in the rain of gold and on top of it. |
| Outro | The town runs up the hill. The prospector who laughed bows his head and she hands him a coin. She stays. |
The arc follows the lyric: "Green or red, I stay" is the pre-chorus, and that is where the room turns on her and she does not move.
Sung shots on the choruses
The choruses are where she sings, so the sung shots sit there: 7 in La última moneda, all in the two choruses. A sung frame has four rules: she faces the lens, her mouth is visible, nothing is in front of her face, and there is no second face in the frame. In every other shot the prompt says "her mouth closed", so an acting clip never looks like singing off the beat.
Approved, then frozen
The owner approves the board sheet before any image is made. Any change after that makes the approval stale, and the board goes back to the owner with a note saying what changed. On Send It that happened 15 times in one night: a lyric chip retimed to the sung word, a graphic moved off her jacket, a callout moved so it no longer hid her singing face.