Pika H3 Flex: Prompt Guide
Learn how to direct shots, dialogue and sound in Pika H3 Flex
Prompt Guide
Overview
Pika H3 Flex is Pika's own video model, post-trained on MiniMax H3. It renders clips of any length from 5 to 15 seconds, at 480p up to 4K, and writes the soundtrack with the picture: dialogue, effects, ambience and score. Prompt it from text alone, animate a first frame, or direct the shot with up to nine images, three clips and three audio tracks as references.
How to write the prompt
- Describe the clip in the order it plays: the look and the setting, then who is where, then each action and how it ends.
- Write the scene in English. Keep dialogue and on-screen text in the language they should be spoken or shown in.
- For more than one shot, number them and give each a start time, like [Shot 2] at 00:04. Save cuts for something new; for a small change of distance or angle, move the camera instead.
- Name each camera move with how far and how fast it goes: a slow push-in, a fast whip pan, a 180-degree orbit. A push-in moves the camera; a zoom changes the lens.
- Put spoken lines in quotation marks and say who speaks and how. For narration, say it is an off-screen voiceover and that the on-screen character's lips stay closed.
- Put on-screen text in quotation marks, spelled exactly, and write "No other text" when you want nothing else on screen.
- Give sound its own line (ambience, effects, footsteps, breathing) and music its own line. Write "No music" for a clip without a score.
- On Omni Reference, attach images, clips or audio and @mention each one (@Image1, @Video1, @Audio1) to say what it is for and how closely to follow it: keep this face exactly, borrow only the camera move from this clip, take just the mood from this photo, use this voice for a new line.
- On Key Frame, start from the first frame and describe what happens next. Add a last frame and describe one continuous action that lands on it.
- Turn on Draft mode to try ideas at 480p or 768p, then finish the keeper at 1080p, 2K or 4K. Turn on Audio stems to also get the dialogue, score, effects, foley and ambience as separate WAV files.
Direct the camera in timed beats
Give each beat one camera move and one piece of action. Say how the people move as well as where the camera goes, and close with the sound.
Prompt
A tall white modernist apartment tower against a soft pale-blue sky with faint streaky cirrus cloud. The building sits on the right half of the frame; the left half is open sky. Smooth off-white render facade with small square windows in thick white frames. Three identical cantilevered concrete balconies are stacked vertically on the building's corner, each a thick white slab with an angled, wedge-shaped underside and a thin white metal railing of vertical balusters. Crisp, graphic, minimal, soft 1970s film palette: chalky whites, powder blue, muted pastels. Three people are doing a slow, calm morning stretch routine, one per balcony. They are always gently in motion, never frozen, but every movement is slow, smooth and controlled, like yoga or tai chi: each stretch takes three to four seconds to flow into, eases gently at the end, and flows unhurried into the next. No fast, jerky, snapping or flailing movements. Graceful, deliberate, meditative. Top balcony: a young woman with dark hair pulled back, in a lilac fluffy knit jumper and matching lilac wide-leg knit trousers. She slowly reaches both arms high overhead, then gradually leans her upper body into a long side bend to the left, eases back to centre, and slowly leans to the right. Middle balcony: a man with short dark hair in a rust-red tracksuit. He hangs in a deep forward fold with palms on the floor, then slowly rolls up through his spine to standing, and lifts his arms in one wide, slow circle overhead. Bottom balcony: an older woman with short silver-grey hair in a cobalt blue short-sleeved polo and loose cream trousers. She holds a wide warrior lunge with arms stretched out to each side, slowly shifts her weight from one bent knee to the other, and gently sweeps one arm up and over her head into a side bend. Each person moves at their own unhurried rhythm, slightly out of sync with each other, with full-body range of motion: knitwear and trousers stretching and settling, real balance and weight. Camera, one continuous shot with no cuts: 0-3s: Wide establishing frame. The camera begins a slow, smooth orbit around the corner of the tower, arcing about 40 degrees, with strong parallax between the balconies, building face and sky. 3-5s: Still moving, the camera pushes in hard on the middle balcony until the man in the red tracksuit fills the frame alone, waist-up, mid-stretch, railing in the foreground. 5-7s: A steady vertical boom up the face of the building, past the concrete underside of the slab above, revealing the lilac woman mid-side-bend. 7-10s: A fast, controlled boom straight down past the middle balcony to the bottom one, revealing the older woman shifting through her lunge. 10-13s: Smooth pull back and reverse orbit, landing on the opening wide composition, all three still actively stretching. Soft diffused daylight, gentle soft shadows under each slab, no hard sun. 35mm film look with fine grain. Stabilized crane/drone motion, never jittery. Sound: natural diegetic location sound only — light wind gusting past the building, distant city hum, faint birds, soft fabric rustle. No music, no score, no singing, no melody, no rhythm track. No speech, no voices, no talking, no dialogue, no murmuring, no vocal sounds of any kind.
Cut between shots and write the lines
One generation can hold a whole scene. Number the shots, time each cut, and keep every spoken line in quotation marks so the model knows exactly what is said.
Prompt
A 1990s American multi-camera sitcom scene exactly like Image 1: bright, flat studio lighting on a living-room set, slight videotape softness, the same woman in red. A live studio audience laughs throughout. Hard cuts between different camera angles. [Shot 1] 0-3 s: wide shot. She carries a pretty birthday cake into the living room and sets it on the coffee table; a small dog in a party hat sits by the sofa, staring at the cake. (Audience: "Aww.") [Shot 2] 3-5 s: medium shot. A sudden knock at the door. She points at the dog: "Wait here. Don't touch it." and walks out of frame to answer the door. [Shot 3] 5-9 s: close-up, locked on the coffee table: the dog jumps up and wolfs down the cake, cream flying, party hat askew, tail wagging wildly. (Audience bursts out laughing.) [Shot 4] 9-12 s: wide shot. She comes back and freezes: only a small piece of cake is left, the dog has cream all over its face and sits back down as if nothing happened, licking its lips. She throws her hands up, baffled: "…What happened?!" [Shot 5] 12-15 s: close-up. The dog lets out a creamy little burp and tilts its head at her. She looks at the camera and sighs. (Big laugh and applause, sitcom transition music.) Sound: studio audience laughter and applause, a knock, the dog gobbling and a tiny burp, an upbeat 90s sitcom theme. Only these two lines. No subtitles or other text.
Start from a first frame
On Key Frame, the first frame sets the people, the props and the light. Tell the model to keep them, then spend the prompt on what happens next.
Prompt
Start exactly on the first frame: a fluffy white lop-eared rabbit nibbling the side of a tall three-tier buttercream cake on a glass cake stand, on a cream silk-draped plinth in front of a dusty-rose velvet curtain. Soft, warm, filmic light, true colour, fine 35mm grain. [Shot 1, 00:00–00:04] A slow push-in on the rabbit as it keeps nibbling a hole in the bottom tier, cake crumbs falling onto the cloth, one floppy ear twitching. [Shot 2, at 00:04 cut] Extreme macro close-up: the rabbit's twitching pink nose and whiskers dusted with buttercream as it chews fast. [Shot 3, at 00:07 cut] Medium-wide from the side: the velvet curtain parts behind the cake and a pastry chef in her fifties, in a white chef's jacket, steps through holding a piping bag, freezes, and says in a shocked, quiet voice: "That was for the wedding." The rabbit stops chewing and turns its head to look at her. [Shot 4, at 00:11 cut] Low angle at tabletop height, a slow dolly to the side: the rabbit looks straight into the lens, slowly resumes chewing, then hops once behind the cake out of sight, leaving a perfect bite-shaped hole. Keep every person, animal, object, outfit and the location exactly as in the first frame; nobody transforms or morphs into anyone else. Real people speak with natural lip-sync. SPEED IS CRITICAL: everything moves at normal real-time speed, like 24fps footage played back at 24fps - natural motion, NO slow motion. Sound: soft crunchy nibbling, crumbs pattering on silk, the heavy swish of velvet, the chef's one line, a tiny thump as the rabbit hops. Music: a delicate, slightly mischievous harpsichord waltz.
Spell out the text on screen
Pika H3 Flex can animate type as well as people. Write each word exactly as it should appear, say when it lands, and rule out any other text.
Prompt
A bold full-bleed motion graphic, NO frame, NO border, NO paper edges — the design fills the whole 16:9 screen. Flat Swiss/geometric style, exact colours and shapes of Image 1, crisp edges. BIG motion, never static, beat-synced to a punchy 120 BPM track. 0-3 s: the screen starts as one flat colour; geometric blocks slam in from all four sides on each beat, building the layout of Image 1. 3-7 s: circles roll across, triangles flip, stripes slide; a figure made of shapes runs through the composition, each step stamping a new colour block. 7-10 s: the letters of MOVE drop in one by one with heavy squash-and-stretch, then hold perfectly still; spell it exactly. 10-13 s: everything except MOVE explodes outward and snaps back on the beat, rearranged into a new layout. 13-15 s: fast camera push-in and a 15-degree rotation into the O of MOVE, ending on a solid colour. Sound: punchy electronic beat with a hit on every shape. No other text.