The two-axis minimum lock
Every shot prompt carries at least two locked axes. Identity is always one. The second is wardrobe or location, chosen by what the scene needs to prove continuity. A walk-and-talk in one street locks identity plus location; a costume-heavy music video locks identity plus wardrobe. Three axes is better. One axis is the amateur setting, and it is where nearly every failed sequence we have audited lived.
IDENTITY LOCK (immutable): Maya — oval face, strong jaw, dark brown almond eyes,
small scar through left eyebrow, black shoulder-length hair with centre parting,
warm medium-brown skin, 5'6", upright posture.
WARDROBE LOCK (this scene): rust corduroy jacket, cream turtleneck, silver hoop earrings.
FORBIDDEN: no glasses, no fringe, jacket never navy or brown, no hat.
SHOT 04/08: medium close-up, 50mm, golden-hour side light from camera left,
Maya turns from window to camera, expression shifts from worry to relief.
Notice what the prompt spends its words on. The locks come first and are copied verbatim from the hero sheet. Only the last two lines change between shots.
Generate the reference set once
Build a multi-pose reference set for each character at the start: front, three-quarter, profile, full body, a neutral expression and one strong expression, in the locked wardrobe, under neutral light. Approve it. Freeze it. Every future shot references this set, and you never regenerate it, because a regenerated reference is a new person with a family resemblance.
If a model update or a platform change forces a regeneration, treat it as recasting: rebuild the set, re-approve it, and re-shoot anything that has to cut against old footage. Do not mix sets.
The continuity card
A continuity card is one small block per shot that travels with the prompt and into the QA gate. It records the mutable choices so that shot five knows what shot four decided.
shot: 05/08
lens: 35mm, eye level
light: golden hour, key from camera left, warm 3200K practical in background
wardrobe_state: jacket open, earrings visible, no bag
emotional_beat: relief -> quiet determination
carry_over: rain droplets on window from shot 04
next_shot_needs: Maya exits frame right
Without the card, continuity lives in your memory, and your memory does not survive a two-day gap between sessions.
Drift score: when to stop regenerating
Score every rendered shot against the hero sheet with a fixed rubric. We use five checks, each pass or fail: face geometry, hair, wardrobe colour and state, body and posture, forbidden-mutation clean. A shot ships at five of five. At four, retry once with the lock re-injected at the top of the prompt. Two consecutive failures on the same check means the problem is in the document, not the dice: the hero sheet is ambiguous, the reference set has a contradiction, or the forbidden list is missing the drift you keep seeing. Fix the document and start clean.
The number that matters is cost per accepted second, not cost per generation. A pipeline that generates cheaply but accepts one in eight is more expensive than one that generates slowly and accepts one in two. Track it per project. This is also why the gate in the multi-agent tax returns structured verdicts: the drift score is a field, and the orchestrator reads it.
The one-long-take rule
Seven hero shots cut together give the model seven chances to drift. One longer take gives it one. When the scene allows, prefer a single 8 to 10 second move with in-shot emotional change over a montage of close-ups, and cut to a second character or an insert when you need rhythm. Break this rule for music videos where the edit is the point, and compensate with a tighter wardrobe lock and a longer reference set.
Music videos: tie the beats to the SRT
For sung content, the emotional beat in the continuity card comes from the lyric timing. Export the SRT, map each line to an emotion and a shot budget, and lock the singer with the same hero sheet across every cut. The song can be regenerated by anyone with the same prompt; the timed, identity-locked picture cannot. That is the durable asset around an AI track, and it is the reason we treat video as part of the release, not a promo afterthought.
The hero sheet and continuity card are documents, so any editor works. For building the locked prompt blocks, our free Image Prompt Builder produces the structured trait fields you paste into the immutable column. If you are producing short-form video at volume, the Social Media Reel Hooks pack comes with shot budgets per format, and the Agent Prompt Vault includes the QA-gate prompt that returns the drift score as JSON.
Feeding the lock into each generator
Every current video model exposes a different door for identity: a reference-image slot, a character or "element" library, a start frame, or nothing but the prompt. The lock is model-agnostic, but the way you hand it over is not, and the order matters more than most tutorials admit.
- Character libraries (where the tool keeps a named entity across generations): upload the frozen reference set once, name the entity exactly as it appears on the hero sheet, and still paste the immutable block into every prompt. Libraries hold the face; they rarely hold wardrobe state or the forbidden list.
- Single reference-image slots: choose the pose that matches the shot's camera angle rather than the prettiest frame. A three-quarter reference for a profile shot invites the model to invent the missing side of the face.
- Start-frame workflows: render the first frame as a still with the full lock, approve it with the drift scorecard, then animate from it. A locked still is cheaper to iterate than a locked clip.
- Prompt-only models: the immutable block goes first, the forbidden list goes last, and the mutable shot description sits between them. Position in the prompt is weight.
Whatever the door, the hero sheet is the source and the tool settings are a cache. When you change models, you re-export the sheet; you do not rebuild the character from memory inside the new tool. That single habit is what let us move a two-character series between three generators this year without recasting either lead.
Reviewing at speed without losing the standard
A sequence of eight shots at three takes each is twenty-four clips to review, and fatigue is how drift gets approved. Two rules keep the review honest. First, review frames, not clips: pull the first, middle and last frame of each take into a contact sheet beside the reference set and score the stills before you watch a single second of motion. Drift is easier to see when nothing is moving. Second, score blind: hide the take number so you do not favour the last one you generated. A gate agent that receives only the stills, the hero sheet and the rubric, and returns the drift score as JSON, does both of these by construction.
Quick answers
Which video model holds character identity best?
None of them hold it across a sequence without a locked hero sheet and reference set. Pick the model for motion and lighting quality, then run the same Identity Lock on top of it.
How many reference images should I use?
One approved multi-pose set per character, generated once and frozen. Adding more unrelated references increases averaging and drift.
Why does the face hold but the character still looks different?
You locked one axis. Wardrobe, hair state, posture and lighting carry identity too. Lock identity plus at least one of wardrobe or location on every shot.
When should I stop retrying a shot?
After two consecutive failures on the same drift check. At that point the fix is in the hero sheet or forbidden list, not in another generation.
Does this work for brands and products, not just people?
Yes. A product hero sheet locks geometry, material, colour codes and logo placement, with forbidden mutations for the ways the model tends to redesign it.
Lock the document, not the dice. Every product mentioned is available at wowhow.cloud — pay once, ship forever.
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