How do you create a character reference sheet using Nano Banana for consistent AI video characters?

Build the sheet in two passes inside the invideo agent: generate a photoreal face portrait in Recraft for identity, then hand that portrait to Nano Banana and prompt a 4-angle turnaround (front, 3/4, side, back) plus a face close-up and a mid-shot, at 4K, on a clean background — generate 4 variations, lock one, and attach it to every video prompt.

invideo is an agentic video creation tool with every current image and video model on tap, so this whole workflow runs in one place — Recraft and Nano Banana for the sheet, Seedance 2.0 for the video it feeds.

Step 1 — Lock the face in Recraft first. Ask the invideo agent to generate a 4K head-and-shoulders portrait of your character in Recraft. Recraft is the right model here because it renders skin imperfections — pores, lines, stubble — that make the face read as a real person rather than a stock render. Generate 4 portrait options per character and pick one before moving on. Hridaye describes the reason directly: "ReCraft actually gives you those imperfections like pores, lines, stubble, like all the little stuff that makes a face look like an actual face."

Step 2 — Hand the locked portrait to Nano Banana for the turnaround. Upload the chosen Recraft portrait as a reference and prompt Nano Banana for a multi-angle character sheet at 4K: front, 3/4, side, and back, plus a face close-up and a mid-angle shot — 6 panels total on a clean neutral background, full body visible, consistent lighting across panels, character centered. Strip any object from the character's hands before generating — props in hand cause angle-to-angle drift across the turnaround.

Step 3 — Generate 4 sheet variations, lock one. Ask for 4 versions of the sheet and select the strongest. In one documented production, 11 reference images total covered 4 characters and 1 prop using exactly this 4-options-per-asset discipline, and character identity held across every scene of the finished film without any LoRA fine-tuning. Lock the chosen sheet in the invideo agent's context so every downstream prompt inherits it.

Step 4 — Add per-beat sheets when the character changes. If the character picks up trinkets, swaps costume, or evolves across the film, generate a separate sheet for each beat — same turnaround layout, same locked face, updated wardrobe or props. A continuous sequence where the character collected a new trinket in each city needed a distinct sheet per stop to keep continuity clean.

Step 5 — Attach the sheet to every video generation. When you move to Seedance 2.0 for the actual shots, the invideo agent attaches the locked sheet as a reference alongside your shot prompt — that's what carries the character identity from a static sheet into moving footage. In a documented Arcane-style episode, locking each character took ~5 generations at roughly $9.78 per character lock — a small upfront cost that paid off across 164 generated clips.

Repairing the sheet instead of re-rolling shots. When a continuity error shows up later (wrong earring, stray AirPod, wrong jacket detail), ask the invideo agent to inspect the sheet rather than re-generating the shot. It will identify the exact panel with the error, fix that panel, update the stored sheet, and let every subsequent shot inherit the correction — surgical edits instead of re-rolling the film.

Two pointers worth knowing. If a complex multi-character configuration (bodies in contact, ropes, carries) won't render from text alone, sketch the arrangement by hand and upload that sketch alongside the portrait — Nano Banana resolves the geometry from the drawing. And on model choice: Nano Banana Pro has noticeably higher prompt adherence than the standard model for character sheets, though some testers find its outputs lean stock-photo-clean — generate on both and pick.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

ReCraft actually gives you those imperfections like pores, lines, stubble, like all the little stuff that makes a face look like an actual face.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director