How do you prevent AI video character drift before it starts?

You prevent character drift by locking identity before the first video generation:

1. Multi-angle character sheets
2. Four options per asset, lock one
3. Character and style context saved to the invideo agent once
4. Locked references attached to every prompt
5. Per-beat sheets for evolving looks One documented 70-second film kept 2 characters consistent across every scene this way — no LoRA.

Lock your character's identity before the first video generation — every lever below front-loads reference material so the model never has room to reinterpret who it's drawing. invideo is an agentic video creation tool with all the current video and image models available, and the invideo agent holds your locked references in context across the whole production.

1. Build multi-angle character sheets before any video. Generate front, side, back, and face close-up panels for every character — one production ran 4-angle turnaround sheets at 4K with face and mid-angle close-ups. Include close-up panels for small details like scars and accessories so they survive across models, and remove objects from characters' hands before generating turnarounds so props don't vary between angles. Show everything: if the model can't see what's under a cap, it hallucinates what's there. For image models, Nano Banana handles fused character sheets and Recraft generates portraits with pores, lines, and stubble that keep faces photoreal. One team locked 4 characters and 1 prop with just 11 reference images, at roughly 5 generations and ~$9.78 per character.

2. Generate several options per asset and lock one. Produce four variations of each character sheet and environment reference, select the strongest, and lock it before production starts — locking references before any video generation is the step that prevents consistency problems through the rest of the film. A documented 70-second short kept 2 characters visually identical across every scene this way, with no LoRA fine-tuning, for $750 total over 2 days.

3. Save character and style context to the invideo agent once. Upload the locked sheets and your style references in a single message and instruct the invideo agent to store them — one team's exact prompt, sent with 64 style frames, was: "I want you to deeply understand this art style and save it into context for further generations." Re-prompting character descriptions scene-by-scene is the anti-pattern; a persistent context system holds identity, lighting, and palette across every shot without re-explaining. Write explicit negative constraints into the locked block (that production's style block specified "not live action, not photorealistic") so the model can't slide back toward its defaults.

4. Attach the locked references to every single prompt. Start each generation prompt with the locked block and attach the character sheets every time — in one 164-clip animated production, every prompt after the lock began with it. Run the invideo agent in Always Ask mode so you approve each prompt and its attachments before credits are spent, and audit those attachments at approval: a stray or wrong reference image produces completely incorrect output. Where model choice matters, Seedance 2.0 reference-to-video accepts character and location references simultaneously — unlike extend — so identity carries across chained segments; the invideo agent routes each shot to the right model, and every roster model is available inside invideo, so you never have to lock references twice on two platforms.

5. Make a per-beat sheet when the look evolves. If your character changes costume or accumulates items through the story, create a distinct character sheet for each visual beat — one production's character picked up a new trinket in every city, so the team built a separate sheet per sequence rather than letting the model improvise the additions.

If drift slips through anyway, fix the source rather than the shot: ask the invideo agent to inspect the character sheet, and it identifies the exact panel containing the error, corrects it, and stores the updated sheet in context so every subsequent shot inherits the fix.

These are some of the ways to problem-solve this — what works depends on your characters and your shots.

Watch some of these to see what works for you:

One agent that reads your treatment once and holds every directive across every shot, every scene. No re-prompting. No drift. So now, you direct, and the Agent remembers.

— invideo's creative team