If your AI video character's face, hair or outfit quietly mutates between shots, the problem is almost never the model. It's that you re-describe the character from memory in every prompt — and every re-description drifts.
After shipping 30+ AI shorts (original-character PVs, a 35s photorealistic slice-of-life film, film-look replications), I stopped re-describing. I write the character once, as a fixed block, and paste it verbatim into every segment prompt. That's the whole trick — here it is, free.
The Character-Lock Block (copy this structure)
[Lock block example] The same girl: long mint-green hair in loop-shaped side buns
with thin braids, amber-gold eyes with star-shaped highlights, white-and-navy
off-shoulder sailor top, blue-cyan chest bow with a golden star, star-pattern
pleated skirt, a large blue bow on her back, one long dark-blue tail tipped
with a blue heart.
That block carried a character through a full 14-second PV, shot after shot, without her outfit swapping colors or her accessories vanishing. The rules that make it work:
- Cover everything, in a fixed order: hair color/style · eyes · top · bottom · signature accessories · special traits. Miss one item and that item is exactly the one that drifts.
- Paste it word-for-word. Never paraphrase it per segment. Consistency comes from identical tokens, not from describing the same thing "well" twice.
- Change only action + scene per segment. The block stays frozen; the segment prompt around it carries the movement, camera and lighting.
- Pair it with a reference image. Generate every segment independently from the same character sheet — in my tests, independent generation with a shared reference beats chaining from the previous segment's last frame, which drifts the worst.
The negative-constraint tail (attach to every segment)
no subtitles, no text, no watermark, no logos, normal hands (five fingers),
no distorted face, no face change
One full segment, assembled
[lock block], standing at the center of a rain-slick neon street, breeze moving
her hair, slowly raising her head to camera, determined eyes, slow push-in,
cinematic light, clean frame, no subtitles, no text, no watermark,
no distorted face, no face change
Where this comes from
This is Method 2 of my AI Short-Video Prompt Pack Vol.1 — the full system behind those 30+ shorts: segmented generation for 15–35s films, image-to-video style replication, the frame-check routine I run before delivery, and 36 fill-in templates (character PVs, duels, slice-of-life, old-photo revival, product shots and more), each annotated with the tool, aspect ratio and segmentation it was verified with. Bilingual EN / 中文 edition.
- 📦 Full pack on itch.io ($4.99): https://zzstudio.itch.io/ai-video-prompt-pack-vol1
- 🆓 The methodology chapter is free on GitHub: https://github.com/zz583/ai-video-prompt-pack
If the lock block saves one of your characters, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
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