Kling 4.0 Short Film Creation Guide: How to Plan a 30-Second Story and Multiple Keyframes

A beautiful image can make viewers stop; a changing story gives them a reason to keep watching.

Kling 4.0 has announced native generation of up to 30 seconds and input support for up to 10 keyframes, providing more room to plan character movement, emotional buildup, and continuous storytelling. The model is planned for an official release in October. Below is a creation method designed around the officially announced capabilities, which can be used to prepare scripts and materials in advance.

First make it clear: what exactly happens in these 30 seconds?

A short film does not need a complicated world, but it does need a change that viewers can understand.

For example:

A young person preparing to leave an old home discovers a childhood photo in an empty room. They stop, look at it carefully for a moment, and finally put the photo into their carry-on luggage.

This story contains a clear starting point, inciting event, and character choice. Emotion is expressed through action, and the shots also have concrete content to capture.

When planning an AI short film, you can first complete a one-sentence story, then break it into three parts:

• Establish the situation: Who is the character, and what are they doing?
• Introduce a change: What makes the character stop or change their action?
• Complete the response: What choice does the character ultimately make?

Once these three questions have answers, the keyframes and prompts will share a common direction.

The role of keyframes is to lock important narrative beats

Support for up to 10 keyframes does not mean you need to use the full amount every time.

Using the story above as an example, you can first prepare four key images: the character standing in an empty room, looking down and discovering the photo, holding the photo in silence for a moment, and placing the photo into the luggage.

Each image should have a clear purpose. The first establishes the character and environment, the second introduces the event, the third presents the emotion, and the fourth completes the story.

When preparing these materials, prioritize consistency in the character's clothing, personal items, room layout, and direction of light. The clearer the setup is between keyframes, the easier it is to judge whether the changes in the final visuals meet the needs of the story.

Prompts should explain how the images connect

Keyframes express important states, while text can further describe the action process, camera movement, and relationship to sound.

The following is an original prompt example, intended to illustrate the writing approach and not to represent tested results:

A realistic short film of about 20 seconds. In the early morning, soft natural light enters a room that is about to be emptied. A young person carries luggage and prepares to leave, then stops after seeing a childhood photo on the floor. They bend down to pick up the photo, look down at it, their expression gradually softening from hurried to gentle, and finally place the photo carefully into the luggage. The camera first uses a medium shot to establish the environment, then slowly moves closer to the character and the photo. The actions are restrained and natural, preserving footsteps, the sound of fabric rubbing, and the quiet indoor ambience.

The focus of this description is to make action and emotion form a cause-and-effect relationship. Why the character stops, why their expression changes, and how they act in the end all have clear reasoning.

The camera should help viewers understand the story

Push-ins, tracking shots, orbiting moves, and shot-size changes are all means of expression.

If the story focuses on the character's reaction after discovering the photo, a slow push-in may fit the emotion better than a large orbiting move. If the focus is the character's movement through the space, a tracking shot can more easily show the process of action.

Kling 4.0's official introduction describes enhancements in camera movement and multi-shot staging. When using these capabilities, you can first ask yourself: what should this camera change make viewers notice? The clearer the answer, the more meaningful the shot arrangement will be.

Use three questions to review the finished video

After generation is complete, you can review it from a narrative perspective:

1. Without reading any text explanation, can viewers understand what happened?
2. Do the character's actions and emotions connect naturally?
3. Does the ending respond to the situation established at the beginning?

Officials have also mentioned that multiple video extensions may in the future extend content to up to 2 minutes, but this capability is marked as “coming soon” and is a different concept from a single native generation of up to 30 seconds.

For your first attempt at Kling 4.0 short film creation, you can start with one character, one scene, and one emotional change. Telling a small story clearly is a good starting point for building your personal AI visual expression.

Contains AI-generated information that may be incorrect. Please verify independently.