Do you need close-up panels in your AI character sheet, or are wide shots enough?

Yes — include close-up panels. Wide shots alone leave small details like scars, accessories, and jewelry too small for the model to read, so it invents them differently in every shot. The documented standard is four turnaround angles plus a dedicated face close-up and a mid-angle close-up, generated at 4K.

Add at least two close-up panels to every character sheet: a dedicated face close-up and a mid-angle close-up, alongside your wide turnaround views. The reason is mechanical, not aesthetic — generation models can only reproduce what they can actually see in the reference. In a wide panel, an earring, a scar, or the design of a necklace occupies a handful of pixels, so the model fills the gap itself and that detail drifts from shot to shot. As invideo's creative team puts it: "the AI always needs to see what the character is exactly... or else it'll kind of hallucinate and imagine something that's under the cap." Close-ups exist precisely to remove that guesswork.

The documented panel configuration from real productions: 360-degree turnaround sheets with four angles plus a face close-up and a mid-angle close-up, generated at 4K max. Two construction rules improve the result: remove any objects from the character's hands before generating turnarounds (held props create inconsistency across the angles), and generate four options per sheet, then lock the best one before any video generation begins — locking the sheet up front is what prevents consistency problems through the rest of the film. In one 70-second short film, sheets built this way kept 2 characters visually consistent across every scene with no LoRA fine-tuning.

The extra panels cost little — one production locked each character's identity in about 5 generations at ~$9.78 per character — and they pay back later: because details exist at panel level, the invideo agent can trace a continuity error to the exact panel and fix it there, and a character whose look evolves across the story simply gets a fresh sheet per beat.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

the AI always needs to see what the character is exactly, right? Or else it'll kind of hallucinate and imagine something that's under the cap. So, we don't want to do that. We always want the character to be seen as we see it on the character sheet.

— invideo's creative team