Order a Prompt Like a Shot List

The problem

You typed a beautiful paragraph and got a beautiful image of the wrong thing. Midjourney reads left to right and weights the first words the heaviest. If "moody" comes before "detective", you get a mood with a detective somewhere in it. If the order is right, the model builds the image in the same order a DP would build a shot.

The order

Think of it as a shot list line, not a sentence:

1. Subject and action. Who is in frame and what they are doing. This goes first, always.
2. Setting. Where they are, time of day, weather.
3. Medium and style. "35mm film still", "gouache illustration", "documentary photograph". This is the anchor that stops the generic AI look.
4. Lighting. One clear source and its quality: "hard rim light from a single streetlamp", "soft overcast daylight".
5. Camera and framing. Lens, angle, distance: "85mm, low angle, medium close-up".
6. Color and mood. Palette words last: "desaturated teal and amber". Mood words like "cinematic" or "epic" go here, or get cut entirely.

Then parameters at the end: aspect ratio, --raw for anything realistic, --stylize low when you want it to listen.

Worked example

Vague version:

a detective in a dark alley, noir style, moody, cinematic, atmospheric, cool lighting

Same idea, ordered:

weathered detective lighting a cigarette, rain-slicked alley behind a neon-lit diner, 35mm film noir still, hard rim light from one streetlamp, low angle medium shot, desaturated teal and amber --ar 16:9 --raw --stylize 100

The second prompt is not longer because it is fancier. It is longer because every word has a job, and the jobs are in the order the model reads them.

Three habits that break the order

• Stacking adjectives up front. "Beautiful, stunning, epic, detailed" before the subject pushes the subject down the priority list.
• Two subjects in one prompt. Competing subjects get averaged. One prompt, one subject. Combine later in the Edit Model.
• Mood words doing lighting's job. "Dramatic" is not a light source. "Single hard key from camera left" is.