How do you lock a character's costume design so it stays consistent across AI video scenes?

Lock a costume in pre-production: generate several costume options from a mood description, pick one, build a multi-angle character sheet — front, side, back, plus close-ups of accessories — and attach that sheet to every generation prompt. Documented productions locked a character in about 5 generations (~$9.78 each) and kept 2 characters consistent across a 70-second film with no LoRA.

Costume drift happens because video models keep no memory between generations — every clip starts fresh, so unless the locked costume arrives as a visual reference in each prompt, the model reinvents it. The fix is a sequential pre-production lock. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with all the current image and video models available, and this entire workflow runs inside it.

1. Turn the mood into concrete options. If you know the feel of a costume but not the spec, give that feel to a costume designer agent and have it generate multiple options to choose from — one filmmaker described only the mood of a character's wardrobe and got several viable designs in a single pass, and in another production the invideo agent produced seven costume variations while the director took a coffee break. One useful selection heuristic from a documented production: if an option feels unexpectedly bold, that's often the one to lock rather than revise.

2. Generate four options per asset, select one, and lock it before any video generation. One production generated four variations of every character sheet and environment reference and locked the winners before a single clip was made — locking references first is the step that prevents consistency problems through the rest of the film. Another team finished day 1 of a 5-day production with cast, costumes, look-and-feel, and world images all locked.

3. Build a multi-angle character sheet in the locked costume. Generate a turnaround — front, side, profile, back — plus face and mid close-ups; one production ran 4-angle sheets at 4K through Nano Banana with portraits in Recraft. Include close-up panels of small details like accessories, jewelry, and scars: the model needs to see exactly what the character looks like or it will hallucinate what it can't see, such as whatever sits under a cap. Remove objects from the character's hands before generating the turnaround, or they'll appear inconsistently across angles. Budget benchmark: roughly 5 generations to lock one character at ~$9.78, and 11 total images covered 4 characters plus 1 prop in one animated episode.

4. Attach the sheet to every single generation prompt. Never re-describe the costume from memory — attach the character sheet (alongside your locked style block, if you use one) to every prompt without exception; in one production every prompt for the entire episode opened with the same locked reference block. The invideo agent holds character sheets in project context, so each shot goes out with the right references attached automatically. Where model choice matters: Seedance 2.0 reference-to-video accepts character references directly, which carries the costume across clip boundaries better than frame-based extension — and since every roster model runs inside invideo, the invideo agent routes each shot to whichever model the references demand. This is how a 70-second short kept 2 characters visually identical across every scene with no LoRA fine-tuning, finished in 2 days for $750.

5. Give every costume change its own sheet. If the character's outfit evolves — new accessories, layers added or removed — create a distinct character sheet for each beat. In one continuous-take production a character picked up a new trinket in every location, so the team built a separate sheet per sequence rather than stretching one sheet past its accuracy.

6. When drift appears, fix the sheet, not the shot. If a costume error shows up in a generated clip, don't re-roll the shot — ask the invideo agent to inspect the character sheet. In one documented case it identified the exact panel containing the stray accessory, corrected it, stored the updated sheet in context, and every subsequent shot inherited the fix while the rest of the film stayed intact.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

I did not have a clear description of the sort of costume for Sylvia, who is our female vampire. But I always knew the sort of feel I want from her costume. So agent 1 was able to give me multiple options in the same zoom.

— invideo's creative team