Sourced stills on pages

Film stills, photography and art have always built treatments. Choose each one for a single quality.

Sourced stills sit beside your generated frames [proven] (the mix is set in Writing the treatment → Storyboard images).

1. Choose: write the decision first, then search by technical and emotional terms. Pick each still for one quality (light, palette, framing, texture, performance), with a take and an ignore note. Avoid the stills everyone in advertising already knows.

2. Avoid a famous actor's face on a casting page, competitor logos and products, stock and watermarked images, and anything AI-made. Show casting with generated frames. A still kept only for its light or costume is cropped or captioned to that quality.

3. Grade to one family, so a page's images sit together. That adjusts a reference on the page; it never fixes a generated frame.

4. Caption it as your decision, in the still's language: "Our light: one window, deep shadows, faces half lit". Never "like Film X", never a promise to match a famous film.

5. No credit line on concept and treatment pages. The Detailed Brief's analysis pages are the exception: other brands' films carry a plain credit line there (title, brand, agency, year). The treatment's optional mood film carries one line saying it is made from other films, and no credits.

6. Log every still internally: title, year, director, cinematographer, timecode or link, the take and ignore note, and where it was used. Then you can answer a client who asks.

7. On the page, a sourced still is a storyboard image or illustration, never a start frame, end frame or anchor.

The one exception to "never attached." A storyboard or presentation image is never attached to any generation, in any role (decided; see Still prompts, storyboard frames and diagrams → Presentation and storyboard frames). The exception applies only to a sourced still, never to a frame you generated.

A sourced still as style only. Option: use it when it is named for that frame [single strong source]. The sourced still is given to the image model as style only for a generated presentation frame. Name it for a frame when one quality of the still, its light, palette or texture, is what that frame needs.

• Give it one role line: "Image {N} is a style reference only: it owns {the light / the palette / the texture and grain}; ignore its people, faces, setting, objects, text and any brand."

• Attach it after the identity and product images. Give each still one quality. Use one per frame as a rule, and never more than three on Nano Banana Pro.

• Write the time of day and palette in words as well: a reference's palette can override the text.

• Check the result for anything that carried over (a person, a costume, another brand's logo). If it did, narrow the role line or drop the still.

• Never on anchors, internal frames or any video job.

Sources

• Filmmaker Magazine, "On Decks", with Robert Eggers, Alexandre Moors and Christine Dávila (article) (captions that say why an image was chosen; avoiding overused images); Bianca Poletti, Free the Work (treatments) (not only film stills).