If you have ever chained a dozen AI video clips into a 2-minute short film, you already know the failure mode: the protagonist is a different person in every shot. Hair length drifts. Jacket color mutates. The prop that mattered in shot 1 vanishes in shot 3. Lighting teleports from dusk to noon.

This is not a “prompt engineering tips & tricks” post. It is a continuity engineering checklist for multi-shot AI video—what to lock early, what to check between clips, and when to regenerate versus accept and fix in post.

The continuity failure mode

Single-shot demos hide the problem. One beautiful 5-second clip does not require identity persistence.

Multi-shot narrative does. A short film is a sequence of conditional generations , each conditioned on imperfect text/image references and a noisy sampler.…