How to Keep the Same Character in AI Video — the One-Photo Method

You generate a clip of your character at the beach. It looks great. You generate the same character at a café… and it's a different person. Sound familiar? That's character drift, the most common complaint about AI video — and it's structural: normal image-to-video animates whatever photo you feed it, so every new scene means a new starting image, and every new starting image means a slightly different face.

Kling O3 (Kuaishou's latest flagship) fixes this with a different architecture: you give it a reference photo of your character, and it generates the scene around them. The face, hair and outfit come from your photo every single time. We just launched a dedicated Character Consistency page built on it — here's how to use it, and how to get the strongest lock.

The 3-step workflow

See it before you try it — one character photo + one scene photo = one video

👤 Character photo

🏞️ Scene photo

→

Output — Kling O3

No editing, no masks — the model staged the girl and the elephant from two ordinary photos. Source: Kling O3 official demo runs.

Step 1 — Upload one photo of your character

On the Character Consistency generator, the left slot is your character. One photo is all it takes — the best anchors are sharp, well-lit, front-facing shots with the face unobstructed. Pets and mascots work exactly the same way as people.

Step 2 — (Optional) add a scene photo

The right slot is a scene: upload a photo of a place — a restaurant, a landmark, your living room — and your character appears in it. Skip it and the scene is built from your prompt alone. This is the key difference from a normal generator: the who and the where are two separate inputs, so you can vary one without breaking the other.

Step 3 — Describe the scene and generate

Write where your character is and what they're doing: "She is eating takoyaki on a Tokyo street at night, neon lights, laughing at the camera." Pick 5, 10 or 15 seconds, toggle audio, and generate. Then — and this is the trick — reuse the exact same character photo for the next scene. Snow day, hotpot dinner, concert. Same face, new world.

Ready-made scene prompts to steal

Getting the strongest character lock

• Anchor photo quality beats quantity. One sharp frontal photo outperforms several blurry ones. Avoid sunglasses, extreme side angles and group shots.
• Light the face. The model reads identity from the face; a backlit or heavily shadowed photo weakens the lock.
• Describe the character's actions, not their appearance. The photo already defines how they look — spend your prompt on what they're doing and where.
• Extreme motion softens the lock. A quiet dinner scene holds identity better than a backflip. If the face drifts in an action shot, dial the motion down.
• Keep the same photo across the series. Consistency comes from reusing the identical reference — don't re-crop or re-filter it between scenes.

What it costs

On img2.video, Kling O3 character-consistent clips start at 35 credits for 5 seconds (40 with native audio); 10s is 65/80 and 15s is 95/120. Every failed generation is refunded automatically, and the same balance works across all our models — so you can compare Kling 2.6 or Veo 3.1 on the same account.

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