25 August 2026 · 4 min read
Casting without a casting. How a face consistency sheet made campaign characters
Four characters, ages twenty to sixty, each returning in every shot with the same face. No agency, no shoot, no production day.
The hardest problem in generative video for a campaign is not aesthetic, it is production. A model will happily make a beautiful face. The trouble starts on the second shot, where it makes a different beautiful face. The viewer will not name it, but they will feel something is off, and the brand ends up with a series of single images instead of a story with a character in it.
A character sheet instead of a prompt
Rather than describing the person from scratch in every shot, I built a character sheet: a set of views of one face, front, profile, three-quarters, in the same light and with the same description. That sheet then becomes the reference for every following frame. I am not generating a person, I am reaching for a person I already have.
Four characters from the consistency sheet4
It is the same logic as a character card in film production or in a game. The difference is that there the card serves the make-up department, and here it serves the model. The effect is identical: across the whole piece you are looking at the same person.
Four people, not forty
I cast four characters: ages twenty to sixty, different looks. Not because that is how many came out, but because that is how many were needed. The campaign had three acts and had to show that the product does not have a single addressee. Four faces are enough to say that, and every further one is another sheet and another chance of drift.
Limiting the number of characters is a design decision here, not a saving. The fewer the characters, the harder each one lands.
Storyboard before generating, not after
Nineteen storyboard frames were drawn before the first prompt was written. That sounds obvious, but in work with generative models it is the easiest step to skip, because generating gives instant pleasure and drawing a plan gives none.
Three acts of storyboard and the key visual4
Without a storyboard, working with a model turns into a lottery: you generate a hundred shots, pick ten pretty ones and try to assemble meaning out of them. With a storyboard you generate twenty shots, because you know which twenty you need. The saving is not in generation time, it is in the number of decisions you have to make at the end, when you are already tired.
The key visual as a by-product
The campaign had no separate banner project. The key visual is film frames dropped into brandbook templates. One shoot, many placements, no extra production. That is the biggest saving in the whole project and at the same time the hardest thing to win, because in many places film and graphics are two separate briefs handed to two separate people.
Boards from the concept deck6
Three cutdowns came off one piece of material: forty-five seconds, fifteen and six. Not shortened versions of the same thing, but three different edits for three different placements.
What it does not replace
Generative casting does not replace product photography. A generated jacket looks like a jacket, but not like that jacket, and in e-commerce the difference between those two sentences is returns. A generated character is good where it tells a story, not where it has to prove something.
Where it drifts
A character sheet is not a guarantee. The face holds well in medium and close shots, less well in wide ones, where it occupies a few dozen pixels and the model starts treating it as texture. The fix is boring: frame wide shots so the face is not the point of attention, or assemble them from shots where nobody is seen close up.
The second thing is clothing. The character comes back with the same face, but a collar can change shape between shots. In a campaign where the clothing is the product, that is unworkable and you have to shoot. In a campaign where the clothing is background, nobody will notice.
Three acts, not three films
The piece had three acts, and that was a narrative decision, not a production one. Each act shows the same choice at a different scale: first in private, then in public, finally as something entirely ordinary. Without that frame, four characters would have been four separate adverts with the same logo at the end.
The storyboard is what guards this. The model has no notion of structure, because it works shot by shot. Structure is held by the person who drew nineteen frames and knows what they need in frame seventeen.
What this means for a client
A campaign with four characters, three acts and three cutdowns, with no shoot day and no casting agency, lands in weeks instead of months. There is one condition: a plan before generating. Without it, this is not production, it is an expensive lottery.