The Master Guide / 09 Performance · Acting
Clamps, restraint, energy for presenters
Generated actors overdo emotion and underdo energy. Clamp the first; write the second out.
Generated actors overdo emotion and underdo energy. Clamp the first; write the second out.
Clamp an emotion from both sides: "pleased, never grinning"; "worried, never tearful".
Restraint by default for drama.
Spell out the energy. Presenters, UGC and comedy need it written down, because Seedance tends to deliver less than you ask for: what they do, how fast, how big ("steps in on the price, eyebrows up, two quick nods").
A whisper is written as what the mouth does: the lips hardly move and the breath is thin. Don't use the word itself.
When two characters look alike, add a WHO IS WHO line that says how to tell them apart ("the one in the green scarf, always frame-left").
No look into the lens unless the treatment asks for it.
Leave clothes, camera and colour out of PERFORMANCE. They belong in their own blocks.
If overacting survives the clamp, use the reaction pair (see Performance → The reaction pair).
Why: five of the films placed at Higgsfield's 2026 festival wrote restraint into their prompts the same way: four as plain bans on mugging and theatrical reactions (Listen to Meh, The Field Agent, Fukushima, Morek), and BALLAST through posture and gait. That shows how they wrote it, not why they placed.