Why the same character comes back with a different face
Ask a video model for "a woman in her thirties in a hotel corridor" twice and you get two different women. This is not a bug anybody is going to fix. The model is not remembering a person between calls; each generation is a fresh draw, and a description narrow enough to name a face does not exist.
The fix is not a better description. It is a picture.
A picture is the fix
When a shot is built out from an actual image of the character rather than from words about them, the model has the face in front of it instead of guessing at one. Every video model in our picker takes reference images; the strongest takes fifty at once.
That is why a cast exists as its own thing here, separate from any one episode. You settle on a character once, and every shot in every episode is generated from that same reference. The character stops being a sentence and starts being a file.
Places drift too
The same argument applies to places. A hotel corridor described twice is two hotels. A hotel corridor generated from one image is the same corridor in shot 3 and shot 14. Lock the set the same way you lock the cast, and the audience stops noticing the seams.
The honest limits
It is not perfect and nobody should claim it is. Lighting shifts, angles wander, and a face at the back of a wide shot is a few pixels either way. But the difference between generating from a reference and generating from a description is the difference between a series and a slideshow of strangers.
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Got questions left?
Do I need my own photos to lock a character?
No. You can generate the character once, pick the frame you like, and that generated image becomes the reference every later shot is built from.
Which models hold a face best?
The ones that take the most references. Seedance 2.5 accepts up to 50 in a single shot; most others take 1 to 9. Each model page lists its number.
Does a reference image cost extra?
On almost every model, no. One model prices each reference at a penny, and that price is shown on the button like everything else.
