The Master Guide / 06 Anchors and stills · Photoreal anchors (Nano Banana Pro)

What an anchor is

An anchor is a new, consistently designed image, made once and attached to every shot that shows its subject.

The anchor rules (decided):

The families: character sheets and identity close-ups; state sheets; location plates (the master plate, reverse, coverage and state); the client's product photos, with a product sheet or texture anchor only where needed; prop sheets and detail locks. A stylised film adds a style anchor. Voices are anchors too (see Voice and Arabic dialects).
Built new, never assembled: each sheet is generated from the approved stills as references, never made by arranging existing images into panels.
One sheet per visible state. Hero props get their own sheets. On character sheets the head stays on the back view.
A frame from a video take never becomes an anchor. It may only guide the composition of a new sheet or plate.
Stage folders hold only candidates that passed your full-size review. Rejected sheets and stills are not kept; their log entries stay.
The gate: one presentation of all anchors, approved by the client, before any production video or internal frame (see Client presentations → The anchors presentation, in its twelve sections). A partial approval locks only the named parts.

The rhythm (decided):

Make one candidate per asset first: each character's first sheet, each place's master plate, each hero product or prop.
Put each one through the full-size check (see Photoreal anchors (Nano Banana Pro) → The full-size check) and the reference bar (see The quality bar → The reference bar).
Review all of them together, once.
Make the remaining wardrobe looks, states and assets as a batch (see Planning, budgets and takes → The generation rhythm).

Staging maps, position images, transparent cut-outs and graphics with text are made in GPT Image (see Still prompts, storyboard frames and diagrams → Staging maps, position images, scale sketches).