Characters and locations

Keep the same characters and places consistent across every shot of a film.

AI models draw every image from scratch, so without help a character can look different in every shot. The Cast & props and Locations pages fix that: you give the studio reference images once, and it uses them every time that character or place appears.

If you use the AI breakdown in Make a film, the studio creates characters and locations for you and makes their reference images when you generate frames. Use these pages when you want to set them up yourself or refine them.

Characters

The quickest way to a character is the builder. Go to Cast & props (the studio’s characters page), click Build a character, and describe them: name, person or prop, and what they look like. The studio renders a few looks; pick the one you want, or drop in a photo of your own, and click Build character. One job then makes everything below from that one image: the turnaround and face close-up, a dozen reference images of the same character from other angles and in other settings, and (unless you untick Train a LoRA) a trained LoRA. Images take about ten minutes; training another 30–60 minutes on an RTX 4090. The card on the Cast page shows progress, and you can keep working meanwhile.

To set a character up by hand instead, click New character or prop. Under Kind, choose Person or Prop (a vehicle or a key object that needs to look the same in every shot it appears in).

• Name: how you refer to them in scripts and shots.
• Description: what they look like, for example “A woman in her 30s with short silver hair, black trench coat”. The studio uses this in every prompt they appear in, so be specific about the things that should never change.
• Sheets: right below Description — a turnaround (four views of the same character or prop side by side, on a plain grey background, so the model can see it from every side) for everyone, plus a face close-up for people. Click Generate turnaround or Generate face close-up, or Upload one you made yourself (a plain grey background works best, and a turnaround shows four views side by side). Once one is set, Regenerate or Upload replaces it. These are what films use to build a scene’s reference sheet.
• Color: identifies them on maps and shot cards.
• Reference images: extra images the studio can use to keep them looking the same.

Add reference images

Below Sheets, you have three options:

• Click Generate reference images to make more from the description. To use one as a Sheet, hover over it and choose Use as turnaround or Use as face.
• Upload images you already have.
• Pick images from your gallery. You can also do this from the gallery: open an image, and from the menu choose Use as character reference.

A few clear, well-lit references work better than many mixed ones. Later, the studio combines a scene’s character and prop references with its location into one reference sheet (one image, all the scene’s characters, props and location side by side) that keeps everything consistent when it renders the scene’s shots. See Make a film with a previs.

Move a character to another studio

A character’s menu (the dots on their card) has Export: one ZIP with their description, reference images, sheets, voice clip and LoRA. On any studio, Import on the Cast page brings all of it back as a new character, LoRA attached. The trained LoRA file alone (from the LoRAs page) doesn’t carry any of that.

Voices

Voices are for people, not props. Give a character a voice so their dialogue is spoken the same way in every shot. In the character editor, under Voice, choose one:

• Describe: write what they sound like, for example “Gravelly, tired man in his 60s, slow Southern drawl”, and click Design voice.
• Upload a clip: choose 5–15 seconds of one person talking with no music, and click Use this voice. Typing what’s said in the clip makes the match closer.

Type a line and click Say it to hear it. To use the voice in a film, see Dialogue and voices.

Voices come with the studio. If you switched voice downloads off when you deployed, see Settings.

Locations

Go to Locations and click New location. Give it a name and describe it, for example “A neon-lit ramen bar, rain on the windows, 1980s Tokyo”.

Establishing shot

The establishing shot is the reference image for the location, shown first on the location page. The studio builds shots in this location from it, so the set stays the same from shot to shot.

To add one, click Generate, upload an image, or pick one from the gallery. You can also add a custom prompt to control exactly what it shows.

Map and camera angles

Below the establishing shot, a collapsed Map and camera angles section holds the tools used by films made from a script (a previs film doesn’t need them, since the previs itself sets the camera).

Map: each location has a top-down map, measured in meters. The map tells the studio where things are, so it can work out what each camera position sees.

• Draw walls, doors, windows, props and labeled zones with the map tools.
• The subject (a star) and the reference camera show where the establishing shot was taken from. Line them up with your establishing shot.

Your changes save automatically.

Camera angles: with the edit models installed, this section also has an angle gallery. Click Render new angle to render the location from another camera position. It works like the Angles mode on the Create page, but the studio saves each angle with the location and reuses it for every shot that looks from that direction.

How films use them

For a quick film, the studio draws each shot by:

1. Rendering the location from the shot’s camera position, using the establishing shot and the map.
2. Placing the characters where you blocked them, using reference images of up to two of them.
3. Animating the result into a clip.

That’s why shots in the same scene share the same set and cast. To change who appears where, use the Blocking button on a scene, or Camera & blocking in a shot. See Make a film.

For a film where camera moves and cuts matter, the studio instead builds one reference sheet per scene from its characters, props and location, and renders every shot in the scene from that sheet plus a previs you (or an AI agent) block out first. See Make a film with a previs.