Series drift is usually blamed on the model. Check the filing instead. The character was described from memory at every job, and memory edits the record as it goes. “Platinum hair in a low bun” in frame one becomes “blonde elegant hair” by frame four, and the audience watches a stranger take her place. The repair is an archive habit: file her once, on a vault card you paste rather than retype.
Five fixed lines, always in order
Age — a number, and in this archive 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 clasp, the mole, the detail that survives any light. Everything else belongs to the changing line: outfit, corner, hour, lamp. Changing lines are meant to change. Filed lines are not.
State the lines plainly and positively; adjectives are reinterpreted at every attempt, concrete descriptions survive. And version the filing: when she is deliberately changed, file the new text as version two with a date, so an old set can be remade exactly as it was.
Working from the filing
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 in the filing: a changing line contradicted a fixed line, or a line was too vague to hold her.
What a filing 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 kept, behind one quiet door, frame after frame.