Seedance 2.5 Face Likeness: Keep One Character Consistent

§ 01What the filter refuses, and what it does not#

We ran the refusal down before designing around it. Each of these was submitted on its own, as the only reference in the request.

01Six references submitted alone: every face refused, every face-free plate accepted.

02Thirty seconds in one segment needs nothing; a recurring person needs the discipline.

03Five framings of the same described figure; only the frontal close-up reads as AI.

04The reference showed lit screens, so two prompts saying screens off changed nothing.

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ByteDance’s launch post for Seedance 2.0 states the policy in a single line: using real human portraits as subject references requires identity verification or prior legal authorization. The public API most people reach the model through has no verification path, so in practice a face in a reference is a refusal. The filter does not distinguish a real person from a drawn one, and it does not care that the face came out of the same model a moment ago.

Three more things about the filter, all learned the expensive way:

• It never names the offending file. With several references in one request, remove them one at a time to find the culprit.
• It false-positives on some face-free scenes. Rain on a window pane was refused twice for us, with and without bokeh circles. Regenerating a variant of the same scene does not help; generate that segment from text alone, or animate the still itself with a slow push-in.
• Nothing you do on the request side clears it. Re-sending is deterministic. Stylizing the face is refused. A stronger prompt is irrelevant because the check runs on the reference, not the text.

What is not gated is generating a face. Describe a person in the prompt and the model renders one without complaint. That asymmetry is the whole method.

§ 02Two regimes: under thirty seconds, and everything else#

Most video requests are the easy case, and it costs nothing to check which one you are in before you build anything.

The first row covers a surprising amount of real work: a fifteen-second product moment with a presenter, a single reaction shot, a thirty-second one-take monologue. People reach for a reference image out of habit and hit the filter for a problem they never had.

§ 03The text block is the identity#

For a recurring character, write one description and treat it as a production asset. Ours read, in full:

Alex, a man in his late thirties, lean build, short dark hair with a little grey at the temples, close-cropped beard, navy linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, dark trousers. He does not speak and makes no vocal sound.

Then three rules:

1. Cover what drifts. Apparent age, build, hair including parting and grey, facial hair, skin, wardrobe down to the sleeves and shoes, one or two distinguishing marks. Lower-body clothing is regenerated wrong more often than anything else, so name the trousers and shoes even when the shot will not show them.
2. Paste it verbatim into every prompt. Change only action, setting and camera. Never paraphrase the person. “Dark hair” is not “brown hair”; a synonym is a new character, and the model will oblige.
3. Version it. If the description changes, every segment already generated is now a different person. A character swap after generation is a full re-shoot of every scene they appear in.

The last line of our block is there for a reason: the model adds unrequested vocal sounds (a sigh, a throat clear) to characters who are supposed to be silent, and the only reliable fix is to say so.

Google’s own Veo best-practice guidance recommends exactly this discipline for text-driven characters: name the character, describe body, hair, face and voice, and copy the complete description unchanged into every scene prompt. Seedance 2.5 makes it mandatory rather than optional.

Across our twelve segments, build, hair and wardrobe held on text alone. Where the face sat small in frame or turned away, nobody watching the film could tell you the person was described rather than photographed. That is not an accident of the description; it is the shot list.

§ 04Framing decides whether the face reads as footage#

Same model, same prompt quality, same character block. The shot decides whether a generated human looks like a person or like a rendering.

The rules that fall out of that table: nothing tighter than a medium shot on a described human; cut human beats against object shots; keep hand-to-object contact slow and simple, because it is the model’s most fragile motion. This is normal premium-brand-film grammar anyway. The difference is that here it is also what keeps the character consistent. Drift shows in the face first, so the film never dwells there.

§ 05Face-free references still carry the world#

Losing the identity reference does not mean losing references. Everything that is not a person still gets one, and those anchors are what make a described character feel like they live somewhere real.

• Environment. Generate the location once with an image model and pass it as the environment reference in every scene set there. Same room, same light, same window, film after film.
• Props. The object that carries a story beat (for us, a desk strung with cables) gets its own reference so it looks the same every time it appears.
• Wardrobe. A flat-lay of the clothing, with no body in it, passes the filter and pins colour and fabric more tightly than words.
• Palette or style frame. One image that defines the grade.

Declare each reference’s single job in the prompt (this image is the room; this image is only the desk) or the model will let a wardrobe image restyle the whole scene. The human rides on text inside a reference-anchored world.

§ 06Reference dominance: what the model will not un-see#

Anything visible in a reference beats any “no X” in the prompt. A prop shot rendered its phone screens lit four generations running because the environment plate showed them lit, and each prompt said “screens off” more forcefully than the last. Constraints that add something absent from the reference are honoured; constraints that remove or invert something visible in the reference lose, silently, every time.

Two strikes, then stop re-rolling. Either edit the offending element out of the reference image and regenerate, which is the reliable fix and the one we found last, or accept the segment and patch the region in post. For a locked-off shot with nothing passing over the region, a measured matte is invisible by construction and deterministic where a fifth roll is not.

§ 07Run a motion test before the film#

Before building anything, generate one short clip, six to eight seconds, of the hardest human shot in the film. A still cannot answer the questions that matter: does the character move believably, does the face hold at that framing, does the world read as real. Show that clip to whoever signs off on the visual language and get the verdict there, when changing the character costs one prompt. After twelve segments it costs twelve.

§ 08The honest caveats#

• This is a September 2026 description of one model’s filter. Filters move. The refusals above are what we measured on Seedance 2.5 through its public API; a different surface for the same model may have an authorized-likeness path, and a future version may lift the restriction.
• You cannot show anyone the actor in advance. A described character has no locked look until the first generation. The motion test is the substitute.
• Other models differ. Veo takes up to three reference images of a person and Kling binds multi-image character elements, so both can lock identity from images. The Sora API blocks human-likeness uploads much as Seedance does. The text-and-framing discipline transfers anywhere; the refusal is model-specific.
• 720p is the ceiling on Seedance 2.5. Anything you composite over the footage (captions, panels) should be rendered at twice the size and downsampled; soft type reads as cheap, soft footage reads as grade.
• Dialogue works with a described character, but the voice is new on every generation. For a speaking character across segments, establish a voice sample from a short described clip first and pass it as an audio reference.

§ 09The checklist#

1. Under thirty seconds in one segment? Describe the person and stop here.
2. Write the character block. Cover age, build, hair, facial hair, skin, wardrobe to the shoes, one distinguishing mark. Add the silence line if they do not speak.
3. Generate face-free references for the environment, props, wardrobe and palette. Declare each one’s job in every prompt.
4. Run a six-to-eight-second motion test of the hardest shot. Get the verdict on visual language before segment one.
5. Paste the block verbatim into every prompt. Change only action, setting and camera.
6. Frame every human beat in profile, medium-wide, over-the-shoulder or hands only. Never a static frontal close-up.
7. If a “no X” fails twice, edit the reference or patch in post. Never a fifth roll.
8. Never pass a returned frame with a face in it as a reference. Write down where the segment ended instead.