How to keep one character the same character across 18 scenes

Generate 18 scenes one prompt at a time and you get 18 nearly-related animals. The beak changes length. The blue shifts green. In scene 11 your bird has picked up a scarf it never owned.

Adults forgive this because we track a story. A three-year-old tracks a creature, and when the creature stops being one creature, they stop watching. Consistency is not polish here. It is the product.

Why it drifts

Each generation is independent. The model reads your words and invents everything you left unsaid, and it invents differently every time. Whatever you do not pin down is re-rolled on every scene.

So the goal is not better prompts. The goal is fewer free variables.

Write the identity clause once

Fix the character in a single block of text that never changes, and paste it into every scene without editing a word. Six things need naming, and they need naming in the same order every time.

• •Species and body shape, in plain words
• •Two colours at most, named as pigments rather than moods
• •One distinguishing feature the eye can find in a small frame
• •The eye treatment, because eyes drift the most
• •Proportion, stated as a ratio to the head
• •One thing the character never has, to close off the model's favourite additions

Pip, a small round bluebird, body one and a half
heads tall, cornflower blue with a coral-orange beak.
One cream feather curls above the left eye. Eyes are
simple black dots, no highlights, no eyelashes.
Never wears clothing or accessories.

Note what is absent. No mood, no lighting, no camera. Those belong to the scene. The clause describes only what must be true in every frame, so mixing the two is what lets the character move when it should be still.

Then build every prompt the same way

Use one order for all 18 scenes and never rearrange it. Word order carries weight in these models, so a stable order is itself a consistency tool.

1. 01

   Framing

   Wide, medium or close, and nothing more elaborate than that.

2. 02

   Identity clause

   Pasted verbatim. This is the part you never touch.

3. 03

   Action

   One verb. Two actions in one shot is how a scene becomes unreadable.

4. 04

   Setting and light

   Where, and the direction the light comes from.

5. 05

   Style clause

   Also pasted verbatim, also identical across all 18.

6. 06

   Camera

   One move and a duration, or the words 'static, no camera move'.

Make the character sheet first

Before any scene, generate the character alone on a plain background in four poses: front, side, back and one action pose. Keep going until all four are recognisably the same animal.

This sheet has two jobs. If your tool accepts a reference image, it is the reference. If it does not, it is still the thing you check every scene against, and it turns a vague sense of wrongness into a specific fixable difference.

If you cannot get four consistent poses of the character alone, no amount of scene prompting will save the 18. Fix the sheet first; it is much cheaper than fixing scene 14.

Two habits that save the most work

First, keep the palette to three named colours for the whole video and repeat them in the style clause. Drifting colour reads as a different character even when the shape holds.

Second, when a scene needs a second character, describe it in one short clause and never let it grow. A companion given equal detail starts competing for the frame, and the mascot stops being the thing the child is following.

Accept the reroll

Even done properly, a couple of scenes out of 18 will come back wrong. That is the medium, not your method. Regenerate those two rather than rewriting the clause that produced the 16 good ones.

The instinct to fix the prompt after one bad output is what destroys consistency. A clause that works most of the time is worth more than a clause you keep improving.