Series drift is usually blamed on the model. Look in the attic instead. The character was described from memory at every job, and memory leaves things in the wrong trunk. “Copper-red hair in a low braid” in frame one becomes “red wavy hair” by frame four, and the audience watches a stranger take her place. The repair is a storage habit: write her down once, on an attic card you paste rather than retype.
Five fixed lines, always in order
Age — a number, and in this attic a mature one. Hair — colour, length and one habitual style. Build — two or three words. Face — one or two details that endure every crop. Signature — the hoop, the braid, the detail that survives any light. Everything else belongs to the changing line: outfit, corner, hour, window light. Changing lines are meant to change. Stored lines are not.
State the lines plainly and positively; adjectives are reinterpreted at every attempt, concrete descriptions survive. And version the card: when she is deliberately changed, save the new text as version two with a date, so an old set can be remade exactly as it was.
Working from the card
Pair the card with changing lines that share one setting and one light, generate at the standard 6-credit cost, and keep the best third. Spend on repairs, transfers and upscales only after the cull. When a frame returns off character, the cause is almost always on the card: a changing line contradicted a fixed line, or a line was too vague to hold her.
What a card cannot do
It cannot hold a character who was never decided. Decide her on paper first. The card is not where the imagination happens; it is where the imagination is stored, frame after frame, under the eaves.