What should a character sheet include for AI video generation?

A character sheet for AI video generation should include a multi-angle turnaround — front, side, and back views — plus a face close-up, a mid-angle close-up, detail panels for small features like scars and accessories, and both a headshot and head-to-toe reference, all with empty hands, locked before any video generation begins.

Build the sheet so the model never has to guess any part of the character — anything the sheet doesn't show, the model will invent differently in every shot. As one documented production put 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."

Multi-angle turnaround. Include front, side, and back views as the base. One documented production generated 360-degree turnaround sheets with four angles per character at 4K max resolution — the turnaround is what lets video models hold the character's silhouette and proportions from any camera position.

Face and detail close-ups. Alongside the wide panels, add a face close-up and a mid-angle close-up. Close-up panels are required for small details — scars, jewelry, accessories — because wide shots alone don't carry enough pixel information for models to reproduce them consistently across scenes.

Headshot plus head-to-toe reference. Cover both scales per character. One production locked 4 characters and 1 prop with just 11 images total — headshots and head-to-toe refs — which is the practical budget per character: a handful of well-chosen panels, not dozens. (Key props that carry story weight get their own separate reference sheet, treated with the same rigor.)

Empty hands. Remove any objects from the character's hands before generating turnaround angles — held props create inconsistencies across the angles of the sheet itself, which then propagate into every video generation.

A separate sheet per appearance state. Whenever the character's look changes — a costume swap, an accessory gained mid-story — create a distinct sheet for that beat. In one production, a character picked up a new trinket in every location, so the team built a different character sheet for every single sequence; one sheet cannot represent two appearance states.

Once the sheet covers all of the above, lock it before generating any video and attach it to every shot — stored in the invideo agent's context, the sheet travels with every prompt automatically. This sheet-plus-context approach kept 2 characters consistent across every scene of a 70-second short film with no LoRA fine-tuning.

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.

— invideo's creative team