Ever wanted to create narrated videos with consistent characters throughout the story? With a little planning, CopyCopter.ai is the perfect tool to get it done.

Today I’ll break down my technique for creating consistent characters like the one in this video.

I’ll do it from scratch with a new story to show you the effect of the technique, and walk you through step-by-step to get dramatic results. In the following sections, we’ll:

* Describe the character in increasing detail to get a specific look

* Clothe the character in multiple outfits to show how little he changes despite the costume changing.

* Show how to separate the character from the scene and action to create modular tools that continue to produce consistent results

* And cover a few caveats of creating consistent characters so you can get your character generated consistently for cheaper with adequate planning.

Remember that you can always pop onto our Discord server to talk through any struggles you’re having, and get support from the community!

Describe the Character

When creating any scene with AI, the more specific you can be, the better the result will be. The goal needs to be removing ambiguity so that the AI can have as similar a vision in its result as to what you imagine. So you start with something like this:

A man in his 30s with blond hair and blue eyes.

You’ve got an image in your head? It’s probably quite different than mine. Maybe yours is something like this:

Cool, but not the image I have in my head. So let’s see if I can fix that.

A caucasian man, about 32 years old. His hair is shoulder length, wild, and a dirty blonde color. His eyes are pale, icy blue.

Getting a better picture, right? Something more like this:

Awesome. But this isn’t my character. So let’s take it further and see if I can show you exactly who I want you to see.

Get Specific About Facial Features

Start to ask yourself questions like, “What does my character do?” Those are the kinds of things we want to answer by their effect on his body.

A tan-skinned, caucasian man, about 32 years old, but with the kind of skin weathered by time in salt water and sun like well-cured leather. His dirty-blonde, shoulder length hair is wild and sun-bleached. His beard is short, no more than 2cm long, neatly trimmed and clean. His eyes are pale, icy blue, but shine with kindness and happiness, untroubled by life.

Starting to get a better picture now?

Notice that I’m not describing clothing yet. Keep the character and costume separate. The result of doing this allows you to better define your character.

Now, we’ve described his face pretty well, but adding highly identifying features (scars, moles, blemishes) can backfire unless you can describe them with extreme specificity, so it’s best to avoid them.

Don’t Forget Their Body!

So now we know how he might look in close-up, but we need to describe his body with some care.

A tan-skinned, caucasian man, about 32 years old, but with the kind of skin weathered by time in salt water and sun like well-cured leather. His dirty-blonde, shoulder length hair is wild and sun-bleached. His beard is short, no more than 2cm long, neatly trimmed and clean. His eyes are pale, icy blue, but shine with kindness and happiness, untroubled by life. He is 1.9 meters meters tall with a slim but muscular body.

Pretty good!

What’s In a Name?

Another trick that is really important for getting consistent results is giving the character a name. This will help you avoid ambiguity in describing your scene.

ISAAC is a tan-skinned, caucasian man, about 32 years old, but with the kind of skin weathered by time in salt water and sun like well-cured leather. ISAAC’s dirty-blonde, shoulder length hair is wild and sun-bleached. ISAAC’s beard is short, no more than 2cm long, neatly trimmed and clean. ISAAC’s eyes are pale, icy blue, but shine with kindness and happiness, untroubled by life. ISAAC is 1.9 meters meters tall with a slim but muscular body.

Make sure that before you move on, you give your character a name that you can use to reference them! This helps to clearly distinguish each characters features, and allows you to set the scene with greater precision.

Dress ‘em Up!

Each generation, I’m giving the character description, but I’m following it with a description of their clothes, again with a lot of specifics. This one won’t be overly specific (He’s a surfer so he’s going to wear board shorts) but even those can have details that get overlooked.

ISAAC is wearing navy blue board shorts that come down to his knee. White drawstrings are tied in a bow at the front. The hem of ISAAC’s board shorts is white and about 2cms wide.

Let’s prove that we’re getting some good results now, shall we? Let’s change his clothing while keeping a consistent context.

ISAAC is wearing a three-piece charcoal gray suit. A white pocket square is tucked into his jacket’s breast pocket. His collar is open, and his top 2 buttons are unbuttoned.

Pretty close — I actually really enjoy the flower in the breast pocket and would probably choose to change my prompt to reflect it as a unique piece. But all in all, the character is pretty unchanged!

💡Tips For Better Clothing

Patterns are prone to change, so try to stick to solid colors for clothing. If you want a complicated pattern, you’ll need to describe it extremely well, and there’s always the problem of running out of samples to draw from.

When you describe the clothing, be specific about the style, fabric, and other details. A leather biker jacket is different from a cafe racer jacket is different from a bomber, so saying “leather jacket” isn’t sufficient. “A black leather cafe racer with three red leather stripes on each arm” is much better.

On Location; And Scene!

Okay, so we have a character description, and a description for how he’s dressed. We want to put those together in a continuous manner, and we can do that by putting our character into connected scenes.

CRYSTALCOVE is a southern California beach with cliffs running the length of the several mile long beach. The sand is dusty white, and occasional patches of kelp are strewn across the beach. It’s sunrise at CRYSTALCOVE and the cliffs cast long shadows as the sun rises in the east.

Beautiful; it almost reminds me of Corona del Mar.

So now we have a location we can reference. Let’s continue describing the scene by including the action that’s taking place and put our character in it.

ISAAC stands on the CRYSTALCOVE beach at sunrise staring wistfully at the crashing surf. The waves are rolling and serene, sending spray up as they crash into the shore.

Put It All Together!

So each frame, you’re going to regenerate your image with a prompt that looks like this:

<Character Description>. <Costume Description>. <Location Description>. <Scene Description>.

I suggest pulling each into their own paragraph in a text file. I’ve put them in an order from least likely to most likely to change, so it’s easier to edit them. For short stories, you’re likely to have a singular character description (for each character), 1 or 2 costumes, 1 to 3 locations, and each frame will have a different scene. So, for example, here’s the description for that last image:

ISAAC is a tan-skinned, caucasian man, about 32 years old, but with the kind of skin weathered by time in salt water and sun like well-cured leather. ISAAC’s dirty-blonde, shoulder length hair is wild and sun-bleached. ISAAC’s beard is short, no more than 2cm long, neatly trimmed and clean. ISAAC’s eyes are pale, icy blue, but shine with kindness and happiness, untroubled by life. ISAAC is 1.9 meters meters tall with a slim but muscular body. ISAAC is wearing navy blue board shorts that come down to his knee. White drawstrings are tied in a bow at the front. The hem of ISAAC’s board shorts is white and about 2cms wide. CRYSTALCOVE is a southern California beach with cliffs running the length of the several mile long beach. The sand is dusty white, and occasional patches of kelp are strewn across the beach. It’s sunrise at CRYSTALCOVE and the cliffs cast long shadows as the sun rises in the east. > ISAAC stands on the CRYSTALCOVE beach at sunrise staring wistfully at the crashing surf. The waves are rolling and serene, sending spray up as they crash into the shore.

Handling Inconsistencies

Be Patient With Descriptions

Part of creating with AI is handling little inconsistencies patiently. There’s some in these pictures that we can deal with by revising our description. You’re going to run into details that you didn’t describe, like the white waistband in the first shot showing the board shorts.

Be ready to regenerate and tweak your descriptions early on — you’ll get better in time with thinking through the things that are causing inconsistencies.

Create Your Character With What You Have

There’s also the possibility of being too specific, so you have to find the sweat spot. AI is great about putting people in different clothes and locations, but it needs examples of people to generate.

If you’re not getting the exact image you want, try to see if you can work with the characters you’re getting and change your description to better describe them to produce a consistent result.

Describe In Accordance With The Style

If you’re using a photographic or cinematic model style, producing a fantasy humanoid creature consistently may be tough. If you’re trying, expect to chew up a lot of credits fine-tuning over and over again as you experiment.

Do It All With CopyCopter.AI

Consistent characters just take a little planning. CopyCopter attempts to provide a consistent description automatically if it’s part of the script to begin with, but sometimes that’s not ideal for the video you want to make.

We’ve made it easy to regenerate each scene and get the results you desire, and so much more. Change shots, add motion, create sound effects or add background music. CopyCopter provides the tools to bring your vision to reality.