Identity anchors: how Studio keeps your cast consistent across cuts
The hardest problem in generative cinema is also the most solvable. Here's how the architecture works.
If you've watched a generative film before Studio you've seen the bug: the same character renders with three different faces in three different scenes. The model doesn't know that the woman from minute 4 and the woman from minute 9 are the same woman. Without intervention, every shot is a fresh casting call.
Solving this is a tractable problem. The mechanism Studio uses is called an identity anchor.
What an anchor is
An identity anchor is a locked image — a portrait of the character at canonical age and wardrobe — that gets attached to every generation request involving that character. The provider model treats the anchor as a low-weight reference: not a copy-paste, but a strong hint about the face's geometry, the skin tone, the eye line, the silhouette.
The anchor is generated once during the Core stage. The user approves it. After that, it's locked — unless you explicitly re-cast, the same portrait travels with every shot of that character for the rest of the film.
What it isn't
An anchor is not a deepfake. The model isn't compositing the locked face onto a generated body; it's using the face as one of several constraints when sampling. The result reads as a coherent character, not as a face pasted on.
An anchor is not perfect. In low light, profile shots, or extreme age changes (a character at 16 vs 60), the model has more freedom and the consistency softens. We surface a confidence indicator on those shots so you can re-roll if needed.
The bible above the anchor
The anchor handles geometry. The Character Bible handles everything else: wardrobe, voice, mannerism, age range, emotional palette. Both travel with the character across cuts. Together they're enough to keep the audience reading one performance instead of seven.
Series users get this for free across episodes — the bible is shared at the series level, not per-film. New episodes inherit the cast wholesale.
When to re-anchor
Re-cast deliberately when the character's age changes by more than ~10 years (the geometry shifts), when wardrobe is canonically different, or when the story explicitly requires a transformation. Studio prompts you at the relevant scene; you can also force a re-cast from the Cast view at any time.
Don't re-cast because a single shot read odd. Re-roll the shot. The anchor is doing its job; the random sample just lost the coin flip.