The Master Guide / 08 Cinematography · Light and look
The look line
The film's look, written once as visible results and copied unchanged into the STYLE block of every prompt.
The film's look, written once as visible results and copied unchanged into the STYLE block of every prompt.
The late style line [best available, not yet validated]: the look goes in STYLE, near the end of the prompt. Light belongs in LIGHTING, the lens in OPTICS, and performance and skin in PERFORMANCE. The sources split: official guides sit on both sides, and independent creators lean slightly toward one LOOK block at the top. So the look goes late, in STYLE.
Write the look once per film and copy it, unaltered, into each prompt the film uses: contrast, black level, saturation and format character, all as visible results. The scene's capture follows it in the same STYLE block (see Light and look → The capture in the look line). The look comes from the treatment's lighting and colour sheet (see Writing the treatment → The light and colour sheet). For example, written for this guide:
STYLE: soft roll-off in the highlights; blacks deep but holding detail; colour a little gentler than the location references; a widescreen frame. This scene: a crewed cinema camera on a quiet set, steady and composed.
No camera, lens or film-stock names. Describe the visible result. About a third of the independent festival films sampled write format words such as "35 mm film look"; none wrote brand stock or camera names. One creator lineage reports film-emulation words washing colour out on Seedance 2.5, and nobody has published a side-by-side showing that names help. Write format character as its visible result too: "soft highlight roll-off", "a widescreen frame" (see Light and look → The clean look is a fix, not the default).
No grain in the look line. Grain, and halation where the treatment wants it, is added once, in finishing, over all live shots [proven]. Hard stops (the full-size checks on hands, faces, lips and labels; see The quality bar → The hard stops) are judged on the take as it came back, before any grain, and grain never rescues a failed take. Gate weave, a slight, slow drift of the whole frame like a film gate's, goes on only where the treatment wants a film-era look (decided). See The grade and texture → Texture once and The grade and texture → Gate weave, glow and halation.
Sources
Higgsfield's Seedance 2.5 prompt builder (the STYLE suffix); ByteDance's Dreamina Seedance 2.5 guide; Higgsfield's Seedance 2.5 prompting guide; Welcome to the Team by @chip_frames (project), ASH (project) and KAGEROU (project) (format words in practice).