What is a style lock?

In practice: a sheet that fixes where the light comes from, the palette, how much detail is drawn in and how the camera behaves — approved before animation, attached and named in every prompt, and re-approved rather than quietly changed if you change your mind. It governs the rendering only: framing, shot length and story stay yours.

Left to itself, every frame is lit freshly and plausibly — which is exactly what flat means. No direction, no continuity, no reason.

Two shots that are each beautiful and lit differently do not cut together. The look has to be decided across the film, not once per shot.

Where the light comes from and what quality it has; the palette; how much detail is drawn into a frame; and how the camera behaves — how much it moves, how heavy it feels.

It is a reference sheet, not a paragraph of adjectives. A sheet can be attached to a prompt and pointed at; adjectives are re-interpreted every time they are read.

The character bible answers who the character is: faces, builds, wardrobe and colour. The style lock answers how the film looks: light, palette, detail, camera.

They are two documents doing two jobs, and both are approved once and then pointed at on every shot rather than remembered.

Attach the approved sheet and name it in the prompt — say the attachment is the style reference — rather than describing the look again in words. The attachment and the words that point at it are what bind it; a reference that is attached but never named is a reference the model was never told to follow.

Then say what cannot change. Naming the fixed things is what keeps a locked look locked.

You re-approve the sheet, and the change becomes a deliberate decision across the whole film rather than a surprise on one shot.

The point of approving it once is not to forbid changes. It is to make them yours, and to know which shots need re-rendering because of them.

No. The lock fixes the rendering, not the framing, the shot length or the story. Two shots from the same film can look nothing alike and still belong together.

Variety comes from where the camera stands and what the shot is for — which is a shot-list decision, made before anything is generated.

The value is not the sheet. It is that the look becomes something someone decided. Left alone, every frame is lit freshly and plausibly, which is exactly what flat means: no direction, no continuity and no reason.

We would also drop the worry that a lock flattens the work. Variety comes from where the camera stands and what the shot is for — shot-list decisions — and locking the rendering is what makes those differences read as intent instead of accident.

Take the prompt packs