I Gave My Video Generator Scratch Paper — How Think Frames Saved My GPU Budget

The moment I stopped trusting the first full render The first time I watched a transition burn a full generation budget and still land on the wrong side of the edit, I knew the problem wasn’t quality — it was commitment. I was paying for the expensive answer before I had any evidence that the prompt had pointed the model in the right direction. That’s what pushed me toward think frames. I wanted a cheap exploratory pass that could argue with itself before the pipeline spent real compute. Instead of generating one expensive candidate and hoping, I now generate a handful of lightweight sketches, score them, and only let the winner graduate to full-quality generation. This is the part that felt obvious only after I built it: video generation needs scratch paper. LLMs have a place to reason before they answer; my generator didn’t. Think frames are the missing margin notes. The key insight: explore first, commit later The idea came from a simple mismatch. A full keyframe is irreversible in