The method here is the one claudia.gallery wrote down in Keeping her herself, adapted to a different stack: Claudia's stills came from Midjourney with text alone; DREW's film came from GPT Image 2.5 stills and Seedance 2.5 clips, with his reference images attached to every video prompt.
The short version
- References first. His face from two angles, a tied-back hair ref, Claudia's face, the garage, the orange car and the rooftop sign were all made as stills before any video. Every video prompt attaches them, so the face and the world stay the same from shot to shot.
- Write the constants into every prompt, in the same words. Copy the identity text from the character; don't paraphrase it.
- Pin the beard. Write "short dense beard" every time. A very dense, full beard is part of his face.
- One blue loc. Never two, and no other blue in his hair. It falls from the front left of his hairline, the viewer's right in a front view.
- The head never changes; the coat can. Hair, loc, cuff, beard, eyes are the constants. The wardrobe belongs to the night.
- Fix the source, not the frame. A wrong reference poisons every clip made from it.
The constants
| Hair | short black locs with rope texture, pulled straight back into a low ponytail |
| Loc | one glacier-blue loc (#7FB8D8), front left of his hairline |
| Cuff | a small silver crescent-moon cuff clipped onto the blue loc |
| Pendant | an iced crescent moon on a chain |
| Watch | white ceramic skeleton, light-blue strap, diamond tennis bracelet |
| Face | warm beige skin, hazel-green eyes, strong square jaw, thick dark brows, calm and self-satisfied |
| Beard | very dense, full, dark, heavy mustache, crisp line-up |
| Colour | the look's own colour plus the blue loc; glacier blue is the one accent |
References carry the face
Seedance 2.5 takes images as references, and every video prompt in the film attached his. That is where his face lives. The text keeps the details from wandering; the references are what makes it the same man.
What a good reference set looks like:
- A face sheet. Seven heads on one plain ground, black and white with the blue loc in colour: front, three-quarters, eyes closed, mouth open mid-line, two profiles, laughing. It shows the model how his face moves, not only how it rests.
- A front portrait and a side view, nothing in the frame but him.
- A tied-back hair ref. Added after early takes dyed all his hair blue.
- The jewelry on its own when a shot can see it. The pendant and the watch each got a still of their own.
What drifted, and what to do about it
- The blue spread. Some takes dyed all his hair blue. The fix was the hair ref on the shots that build or fix him and one sentence in the prompt: "Only ONE single loc is bright blue, at the front left. All his other hair stays black."
- His eyes. Driving shots kept turning him toward the camera. An edited still where he watches the road and she watches him fixed it.
- The loc's position. If the loc swings to the wrong side or over the top of the head, say "at the front left" and check the reference. A flipped reference flips every clip.
What changes and what doesn't
The film has two looks: the black overcoat over a black tee, and the black silk robe on the 4am terrace. A scene never changes clothes between cuts. A new look changes everything below the neck and nothing above it.
In motion
- Attach the references to every video prompt, not only the first one in a scene.
- Say where his eyes go. He looks into the lens only when he raps. In every other shot, write that his eyes never turn toward the camera.
- Give him something to do that fits him. Fixing a coat collar once, a quarter turn of the chair, a smirk. A calm man still does something.
The check before a still feeds a video
- one blue loc, at the front left, with the cuff
- a dense full beard and a grown man's face
- hazel-green eyes
- no text or logos anywhere in frame
- the jewelry the shot needs, matching its reference
- hands with five fingers and natural anatomy