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In Medias Res Prompt for AI Image & Video

Beginning the story in the middle of the action rather than from the chronological start, hooking the audience immediately and creating mystery about how we got here. The technique dates to Homer's Odyssey and has been a staple of cinema since film noir. Quentin Tarantino opens "Reservoir Dogs" in the aftermath of a heist gone wrong, and Christopher Nolan begins "The Dark Knight" mid-robbery. The Coen Brothers drop viewers into the middle of violent chaos in "No Country for Old Men." Sam Mendes opens "American Beauty" with Kevin Spacey narrating from beyond the grave, and Danny Boyle begins "Trainspotting" with a full-sprint chase sequence set to Iggy Pop.

By Ivan Flugelman · Reviewed 16 July 2026

Prompt template

In medias res with [Subject] dropped without context into the middle of intense action already in progress, no exposition or setup, no explanation, the audience thrown into adrenaline and forced to piece together the story from fragments, handheld camera energy and desaturated color grade, the Tarantino-Nolan principle that starting in the middle makes the audience lean forward

Replace [Subject] with your own character or scene. The prompt is technology-agnostic and works as a starting point for AI image or video generators.

When to use In Medias Res

Use in medias res when the opening needs immediate pressure, movement, or mystery. Start after the plan has failed, during the chase, or at the instant a relationship breaks, then let context emerge through behavior and consequences. It suits stories where discovery is part of the pleasure. Even without exposition, viewers need a concrete objective, threat, or question to orient their attention inside the chaos.

Directing the AI

Open on action already underway: the subject running, hiding, arguing, escaping, or recovering from an unseen event. Use reactive handheld framing, compressed background information, and visible consequences such as damage, breathlessness, or scattered objects. Withhold names and explanations, but make the immediate stakes legible through direction of movement and character focus. Seed two or three contextual fragments that can be understood later. Do not pause the scene to explain how everyone arrived there.

Common mistakes

Withholding every point of orientation, turning deliberate mystery into a scene with no readable objective.
Stopping the action for immediate exposition, which cancels the momentum created by the opening plunge.
Staging generic chaos without specific consequences that hint at the unseen events preceding the scene.

Sources and further reading

How to Make a Short Film: An Introduction to Filmmaking — BFI / FutureLearn
Filmmaking Resources for Teachers — British Film Institute

A technique is one decision. A world is the system.

A still cannot tell a story, but it can prove one happened. Before, during and after are the three states every frame sits in.

Read Story in full, free, or start with the thirteen fundamentals for building consistent characters, environments, visual logic, and stories that expand beyond one beautiful frame. There is also World Building Codex 3.0, free, and the World Building Academy.

Related techniques

Smash Cut

An abrupt, jarring cut between two vastly different scenes — often from quiet to loud, calm to chaos, or a character saying "nothing could go wrong" to everything going wrong. Edgar Wright is the modern master of the smash cut, using it for comedic whiplash throughout "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz." Kubrick's smash cut from the bone to the satellite in "2001" is the most dramatic temporal smash cut in cinema. The Coen Brothers use smash cuts for dark comedy in "Fargo" and "No Country for Old Men," and David Lynch uses them in "Mulholland Drive" to shatter the viewer's sense of narrative stability.

Cliffhanger

Ending a scene, episode, or act at a moment of peak suspense, leaving the outcome unresolved and exploiting the human need for closure to keep audiences desperate for more. The term comes from Thomas Hardy's serialized novel "A Pair of Blue Eyes," where a character literally hangs from a cliff. "The Empire Strikes Back" ends on one of cinema's greatest cliffhangers — Han frozen in carbonite, Luke maimed and shattered by Vader's revelation. Television perfected the cliffhanger with "Dallas" 's "Who shot J.R.?" and "Breaking Bad"'s mid-season endings. Christopher Nolan ends "Inception" on a philosophical cliffhanger with the spinning top.

Non-Linear Narrative

A story told out of chronological order — rearranging time to create mystery, thematic resonance, or a puzzle the audience assembles. Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" made non-linear narrative a mainstream phenomenon, while Christopher Nolan's "Memento" pushed it to its logical extreme by running the entire film in reverse. Alejandro González Iñárritu's "21 Grams" fragments three timelines into a mosaic, and Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" uses non-linear structure to redefine the audience's understanding of time itself. Gaspar Noé's "Irréversible" tells its story in reverse chronological order, making its final scene of peaceful joy the most devastating in the film.

Flashback

A scene that takes the audience back to an earlier point in time, revealing backstory, providing context for present behavior, or recontextualizing what we thought we knew. "Citizen Kane" is structured entirely around flashbacks as reporters investigate Charles Foster Kane's life. Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather Part II" masterfully interweaves flashbacks of young Vito Corleone with the present-day story of his son Michael. Christopher Nolan uses fragmented flashbacks as a structural principle in "Memento," where the reversed chronology makes every flashback a revelation. Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life" uses flashback as pure sensory memory, evoking childhood through images rather than plot.

Foreshadowing

Planting subtle hints of events to come — a cracked mirror, a line of dialogue, a color choice — details that seem innocuous on first viewing but become devastating on rewatch. Stanley Kubrick embedded foreshadowing details so densely in "The Shining" that the documentary "Room 237" is dedicated entirely to analyzing them. M. Night Shyamalan structures "The Sixth Sense" so that every scene contains foreshadowing of the twist ending. The Coen Brothers plant narrative seeds early — the wood chipper glimpsed in the first act of "Fargo" becomes the instrument of horror in the third. Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" hides its entire twist in plain sight through carefully constructed visual foreshadowing.

Breaking the Fourth Wall

A character directly addresses or acknowledges the audience, shattering the illusion of the fictional world to create intimacy, comedy, or existential awareness. Groucho Marx was an early master, but the technique reached its dramatic potential when Ingmar Bergman had actors stare into the camera in "Persona" and "Summer with Monika." Ferris Bueller's conspiratorial monologues to the audience in John Hughes's film became iconic, and Kevin Spacey's direct address in "House of Cards" (inspired by Ian Richardson in the original BBC series) made the fourth wall break a prestige TV staple. Spike Lee's characters break the fourth wall for political address, and Fleabag's knowing glances in Phoebe Waller-Bridge's series elevated the technique to new emotional heights.

Flashforward

A scene that jumps ahead to show future events before returning to the present timeline, creating dramatic irony, dread, or anticipation by revealing a destination before the journey. Nicolas Roeg used flashforwards brilliantly in "Don't Look Now," where glimpses of the future create a web of dread throughout the film. "Breaking Bad" famously opens seasons with enigmatic flashforwards — the machine gun in the trunk, the burning teddy bear — that recontextualize everything that follows. Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" builds its entire narrative twist on what the audience assumes are flashbacks but are actually flashforwards, fundamentally altering the audience's understanding of time and memory.

Parallel Storylines

Multiple narrative threads running simultaneously, often converging at key moments, creating thematic parallels and enriching the story by showing how different characters experience the same world. Robert Altman pioneered the multi-storyline film with "Nashville" and "Short Cuts," weaving dozens of characters into tapestries of intersecting lives. Paul Thomas Anderson followed with "Magnolia," where parallel storylines converge in a climax of biblical surrealism. Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" weaves four storylines across three continents. Christopher Nolan's "Dunkirk" runs three parallel timelines at different temporal speeds — one week, one day, one hour — that converge at the climax.

Frame Narrative

A story-within-a-story structure — a character tells a tale, and we watch it unfold — creating layers of perspective, questions of reliability, and a satisfying nesting of narratives. Rob Reiner's "The Princess Bride" is a beloved frame narrative, with Peter Falk reading to Fred Savage while the fairy tale plays out. "Titanic" uses a frame narrative of elderly Rose recounting her experience to researchers. Wes Anderson employs nested frame narratives in "The Grand Budapest Hotel" — a girl reads a book by an author recounting a story told to him by Zero Moustafa. The frame narrative raises inherent questions of reliability since we see events filtered through a teller's perspective.