How One Field Controls Four Art Styles: Realistic, Anime, Ancient, and Modern in AI Film

AI films can simultaneously manage four art styles—realistic, ancient costume, anime, and modern—thanks to a single field: imgstyle. This field has exactly four values: xs for realistic, gz for ancient costume, dm for anime, and xd for modern, automatically carried from the atctype field in the article table. Before each storyboard generates images, the system reads this field and automatically decides which style system the entire prompt set will follow. In other words, change one letter in one field, and the art style of every shot in that chapter changes completely—no need to touch a single line of the prompt body. Where is this field stored? It isn't in the storyboard table; it lives in the article table dbvideo_article. This means art style is assigned per chapter, not per shot. Taking "The First Avenue" as an example, the film's four main chapters—Five Elements Dragon Flag, Miaobazi Super Body, Miaobagua Super Body, and Jiabuyi Super Body—can each carry a different art style. One chapter is one unit, and every shot within that chapter follows the chapter's style. Based on experience, this design makes sense—you can't have one second in ancient costume and the next second in anime within the same dialogue scene; the audience would be pulled straight out of the story. So defining art style by chapter is both simple and effective. How do you actually operate it? You need to decide each chapter's art style before entering the body text. For example, if your first chapter is a court drama, fill atctype with gz for ancient costume; if your second chapter is modern urban, fill atctype with xd for modern. You bring it in at the point of entering the article. When the system splits storyboards and generates characters and locations, the imgstyle field is automatically written into every storyboard record following article.atctype. Later, at the image generation stage, the program reads imgstyle and calls the corresponding prompt template. Throughout the entire process, you don't need to manually edit a single storyboard record—the field propagates automatically. Based on experience, the key to this mechanism is planning ahead—figure out how many chapters your film has and what style each chapter will use before you start entering the body text, and everything downstream will flow smoothly. Does switching styles damage already-generated images? No. imgstyle only affects newly generated images; first-frame and last-frame images already in the database remain untouched. For example, if you generate the first image in realistic style and then suddenly switch the chapter to anime, the old image won't be overwritten—only subsequent new images will come out in anime style. Here's a trap: if you change the art style but don't regenerate the completed shots, the finished film will contain a mix of two styles, and inconsistency within the same scene will be painfully obvious. Based on experience, the best practice is to generate each chapter end to end in one pass and avoid mid-stream changes. The material also notes that first-frame and last-frame images must be generated as a pair. If you change the style and only regenerate the first frame while the last frame remains in the old style, the generated video will look even worse. So switching itself is safe, but the accompanying regeneration must be done completely. Are the prompt templates the same across all four styles? The structure is the same; the content differs. In the prompt template, process.aiwords is an eight-part skeleton: character information, lip-sync consistency, accent and tone, shooting technique, scene location, on-screen action, aspect ratio, clarity, and duration. This skeleton is style-agnostic—all styles share the same structure. Only three variable spots change with imgstyle: style keywords, camera whip, and music style. For example, character information in realistic style would say "realistic skin texture, natural light and shadow," while anime style would say "clean contour lines, saturated colors, cel-shaded texture," and ancient costume style adds costume descriptions like "hair crown, ru skirt, jade belt." Based on experience, when doing it yourself, first write a complete eight-part template for realistic style, then when switching styles, only modify those three variable spots while keeping the other five parts fixed—this controls cost and ensures consistency. What step do beginners most often get wrong? The most typical mistake is changing the art style mid-way but not re-running the entire chapter's storyboards. Someone gets halfway through, decides a chapter looks off, changes one letter in atctype, and then discovers subsequent new shots are in the new style while previously generated shots remain in the old style—the whole chapter ends up a mess. This is exactly what the material means by "mid-way style changes require re-running the entire chapter's storyboards." It sounds simple, but in practice, re-running 1,029 shots takes another three to four days. Based on experience, the correct approach is to lock down all chapters' art styles before starting work, write them on a piece of paper taped to your monitor, fill them in correctly when entering the body text, and never change them afterward. Another trap is mistyping the imgstyle value—say, typing dx instead of xd. The system can't recognize it and defaults to realistic style. You won't notice until the finished film comes out and every modern chapter has realistic faces. Having to tear it down and start over is painful. Are there counterexamples? Yes. Someone, to pursue style uniformity, used a single art style across every chapter of the film—say, all realistic. When a character had a dream sequence, they also used realistic style, and the visuals felt flat with no dreamlike quality. In the material, the four chapters of "The First Avenue" can support a two-hour-and-twenty-minute runtime precisely because there are sci-fi and historical threads with layered art styles, so the audience doesn't get bored. Another counterexample is switching styles too frequently—changing style on every shot. On the surface it looks flashy, but in reality the audience cannot remember what any character looks like, because the same character's face varies enormously across different styles and becomes unrecognizable. Based on experience, a film should stay within two to three art styles at most, and each style should occupy at least one full chapter—never switch from shot to shot. Why can one field control four universes? Because art style isn't something you re-describe in every prompt; it's something that responds through a switchable system. When you change imgstyle, you're flipping the "universe switch" for all storyboards, and the system automatically brings the corresponding costume, scene, lighting, and color descriptions into the eight-part skeleton. That line from the material is key: "The essence of this design isn't the prompts; it's breaking a film into enumerable, re-runnable, replaceable records." Art style works the same way—it isn't hard-coded into each shot; it lives in one field and can be replaced at any time. Think about it: if this weren't the case, 1,029 shots would each require manually editing the style description. Even three computers running eleven days wouldn't get it done. Now, one field value changes, and every storyboard in the chapter follows. That's the power of engineering. What's the immediate next action? Pick a character you're currently working on, write four different prompts using the four values xs, gz, dm, and xd, put the same character's description into the eight-part skeleton, generate four images, and lay them side by side. You'll see the same character looking like a real person in realistic style, a flat paper-cutout in anime style, draped in robes in ancient style, and wearing a T-shirt in modern style—that's the direct visual effect of one field switching between four universes. Pick one first, see which best matches the tone you want, set it as your first chapter's imgstyle value, enter it into atctype, and follow that thinking from there. Remember: art style isn't improvised on the fly—it's a field you nail down before you start.