Planning, Scripting & Ideas
Inciting incident
Also called: the trigger
A screenwriting term that transfers cleanly to video. It is the moment the situation changes: the letter arrives, the money runs out, the experiment goes wrong. Before it you have a description of how things are, and after it you have a story, because there is now a problem the viewer wants resolved.
On YouTube the mistake is placing it late. A video that spends three minutes on background before anything happens is asking people to sit through the least interesting part on trust. Common practice is to open on the incident itself, or on a flash of where it leads, and feed in the context afterwards, once the viewer has a reason to want it.