← How To · Director · 10 min read

How to style-lock an AI artist for filmmaking

An off-the-shelf image model gives you one stunning frame and then forgets what your hero looks like. Style-locked AI gives you 200 frames that all read as the same film. The trick is a properly constructed reference bible plus a Vision-QA pass after every generation that catches drift before it ships.

1

Open /ai-artist and pick or create an artist

Mitchell Hughes is our built-in licensed in-house artist with three canon styles already locked: LINE (sketch-only), TONE (grayscale wash), COLOUR (watercolour marker). Or click 'New custom artist' for a slot you control — each custom artist supports up to 3 user-named styles with 10 reference images each.

2

Upload reference images per style

Drag 6-10 reference images into each style slot. Vary the framing — wide, medium, close — and the subject — characters, environments, lighting. The Vision pass will read them all and extract the linework, the value structure, the colour palette, and the rendering signature as concrete rules.

3

Click 'AI Style Sync'

The Vision pass reads every uploaded image and writes the style rules into the artist_style_sync table. The first sync takes 30-60 seconds depending on image count; subsequent re-syncs against the same bible are free (we hash the inputs and skip re-paying for unchanged images).

4

Lock the artist to the project

Each artist can be locked to a specific project. From that point on every generation in /ai-artist for that project routes through that artist's style rules + bible references. Switching project automatically switches the active artist + style lock — no drift between productions.

5

Generate and let Vision-QA score the result

Every generated frame is independently scored by a Vision-QA pass against the reference bible across 6 dimensions: line / tone / colour / cinematic / photo-realism risk (inverted) / prompt accuracy. Anything below 82/100 overall auto-retries once with a corrective prompt targeting the failed dimension. You only pay the base credit for the first attempt — the retry is fixing what you already paid for.

The artist + bible + Vision-QA loop is what keeps 200-frame storyboards reading as one film instead of 200 unrelated illustrations.

Try it

Open /ai-artist and follow the steps

Every app on every tier — no feature gates. Start free with the waitlist, generate your first frame today.

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