How do AI agents find and use real-world location references for film production?

AI agents scout locations by retrieving real-world landmark images from the internet on request: you describe a sequence's setting, the invideo agent pulls candidate reference images from the web, you select the plates you like, and the invideo agent couples them with your locked character, lighting, and color context before routing everything into Seedance 2.0 Reference-to-Video for generation.

Describe the location to the invideo agent and let it retrieve the references — that is the core of the workflow. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with the current video models and reference workflows built in, so retrieval, selection, and generation all happen in one place.

1. Brief the invideo agent per sequence, not per film. Tell it which real-world place or atmosphere each sequence needs — a specific city, a landmark, a type of terrain. Pulling references mapped to individual sequences produces more precise generations than one general mood board for the whole film.

2. Let the invideo agent retrieve real-world images from the internet. Given a location description, the invideo agent researches and returns real-world landmark images as candidate location plates — you don't browse image search yourself. In one documented production: "Agent 1 referenced these images off the internet for me, and I picked the ones I liked."

3. Keep selection with you. The agent does the research labor; you make the creative call on which plates match the film. When you hand the chosen plates back, tell the invideo agent what to take from each reference and what to ignore — exclusion instructions matter as much as inclusion.

4. Let the invideo agent couple the plates with your locked context. It attaches the selected location references to everything already in its context — lighting plan, color, character sheets — so the generation brief is a compound package, not a lone image. As the team put it: "Agent One then coupled that with all the context I had given it with lighting, colors, characters, all locked in and gave me multiple outputs."

5. Route into Seedance 2.0 Reference-to-Video. This is the model step that makes web-scouted plates usable: Reference-to-Video accepts character references and location references simultaneously, which extend cannot — so the spatial and atmospheric context of the real-world plates carries directly into the generated clips. All of these models run inside invideo, so the invideo agent routes the package without you switching platforms. (For continuous takes that move across multiple scouted locations, the same character and location references can be re-attached segment by segment — an adjacent chaining technique built on the same Reference-to-Video inputs.)

This workflow held up in production: one documented short film built around multiple internet-scouted international locations finished at roughly $5,000 (20,000 credits) over 4 days, with the team calling that budget "kind of ridiculous" value for a film of that scope.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

Agent 1 referenced these images off the internet for me, and I picked the ones I liked.

— invideo's creative team