How to start a new story without reusing your old characters
Name the characters that must not come back. Vizard Agent samples your previous episodes, looks at each protagonist's face so it knows what it is avoiding, and then designs a fresh cast. A character you cannot picture is one you cannot reliably keep out.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Name the old characters rather than describing them, and say it more than once. The previous episodes are in the project, so a name is enough for Vizard Agent to go and find the face. Repetition looks clumsy in a brief but does real work here: you are overriding a sensible default, and a single clause among forty lines of story is easy to weigh lightly.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Consistency is the default on a series, and nothing about a new brief signals that the old characters are unwelcome. Avoiding a face is a comparison, and a comparison needs both sides, so Vizard Agent looks at the protagonists it must stay away from before it designs anyone new. In the session behind this article it:
- Loaded the playbook, the tools and the past projects, and listed the typefaces the language needed.
- Sampled the previous shorts for their style and characters, viewing one episode's opening, middle scene, a later scene and its ending.
- Checked the other previous protagonist's face specifically.
- Generated a character sheet for the new cast and inspected it before a single panel was drawn, where a resemblance is caught cheaply rather than across sixteen finished panels.
- Generated the story panels from the new sheet, reviewed them in batches, animated the key panels and built the hook.
- Timed the narration to the target length, checked the captions at phone size, and reviewed the storyboard and the waveform before delivering.
When does this not work well?
"Different" is a much weaker instruction than "the same", and it degrades faster. Two people generated from similar descriptions in the same house art style can end up looking like relatives even when Vizard Agent copied neither from the other. A very tight house style limits how different faces can get, and a long-running series means many faces to avoid.
Common questions
Why does it look at the old ones first? Because avoiding a face requires knowing it. Vizard Agent cannot check a rule it cannot see.
Do I have to name them? It helps Vizard Agent a lot. "Any protagonist from previous videos" catches the rest.
Will the format change too? Not unless you ask. Tell Vizard Agent what should stay the same.