Should you lock character sheets before starting AI video generation?

Yes — lock character sheets before you generate a single video clip. It's the highest-leverage pre-production step for stopping identity drift across scenes, and the math backs it: in one documented production, 5 generations and roughly $9.78 per character locked the entire cast, then held consistent across 41 final clips in a 3-minute film with zero LoRA training.

Lock them if your film has more than one scene or more than one character — which is almost every film. Without a locked sheet, every new prompt re-rolls the face, the costume reads differently shot to shot, and you burn credits regenerating shots that should have been right the first time. With a locked sheet attached to every generation, the model has a visual anchor it returns to, and continuity becomes the default instead of the exception.

invideo is an agentic video creation tool with every current video and image model and upscaler available inside it, so the locking workflow runs end-to-end in one place without switching platforms.

How to lock — the four-step workflow

1. Answer the four pre-production questions first. Before any asset generation, force a decision on character description, antagonist/entity reference, prop spec, and deliverable format. The invideo agent calls these "the four things that will change every frame" — leave them open and every downstream sheet drifts.

2. Generate portraits, then turnaround sheets — frames first, video later. Use GPT-Image-2 or Recraft for photoreal face portraits (Recraft renders skin pores, lines, and stubble that read as a real face), then Nano Banana for multi-angle character sheets at 4K with four angles plus face and mid-angle close-ups. Remove objects from hands before the turnaround so angles stay clean. One documented production generated 11 reference images total to cover 4 characters and 1 prop.

3. Generate four options per sheet, pick one, lock it. Across documented productions the pattern is consistent: 4 variations per character sheet and environment reference, select the best, and freeze it before video generation begins. Locking one character cost ~5 generations and ~$9.78 in one Arcane-style production.

4. Attach the locked sheet to every video prompt. Run the invideo agent in Always Ask mode so every Seedance 2.0, Veo, or Kling generation goes out with the character sheet and style block attached, and you approve shot-by-shot before credits move.

When locking is non-negotiable vs. when you can skip it

Lock if: 2+ scenes, 2+ characters, any costume change, any close-up coverage, or any client-facing deliverable. The cost of NOT locking is per-prompt drift — different face, different outfit, different proportions each shot — which means re-generation cycles that dwarf the 5 generations it takes to lock upfront. Skip locking only for single-shot tests, mood explorations, or style probes where character identity doesn't carry across cuts.

For evolving characters (costume changes across a sequence, a trinket added each beat), generate a distinct sheet per beat rather than one master sheet — one production needed a new sheet for every city its character moved through because the costume kept gaining elements.

As Hridaye, invideo's creative director, puts it: "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."

The proof in the production numbers

Across documented productions that locked sheets upfront: a 70-second short film with 2 characters held consistency across every scene for $750 total (no LoRA); a 3-minute Arcane-style animated episode ran 164 Seedance 2.0 clips with 41 making the final cut (~25% editorial yield) at $315 per finished minute; a 90-second horror short ran 400 video generations for $870. Total costs across these productions range $750–$5,000 and finished-minute costs run $315–$750 — and in every case, locking characters before video generation is the step the directors credit for keeping that math viable.

One fix when drift still appears

If a continuity error sneaks through (wrong earring, wrong scar), don't re-roll the shot — ask the invideo agent to inspect the character sheet for the source of the error. In one production the agent identified exactly which panel of the character grid contained the mistake, corrected it, stored the updated sheet in context, and only regenerated what was affected — leaving the rest of the film intact.

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.

— Hridaye, invideo's creative director