Design The Shot Around What The Model Cannot Do

One list of 44 terms goes to the end of every prompt on every renderer, still or moving, and it never comes off. Tier 1 is not taste. It is a kill switch. 14 of the 44 are skin and beauty words: waxy, plastic, airbrushed, over-smooth, the beauty-filter default, the doll, the wax figure, the cartoon. 7 of them are hands and limbs: extra fingers, fused fingers, six fingers, deformed hands, extra limbs, extra digits, mutated hands. 4 are identity: a morphing face, a cloned face, a cloned subject, drift. The rest are motion, text and the frame itself: jitter, warped, watermark, oversaturated, halo, vignette, blurry. Then the last line of the 44, the one people forget. Looking at the lens. The moment a subject knows the camera is there, they stop being a subject.

The first render comes back and the skin has the gloss of a wet car. Nobody asked for that. Nothing broke. The beauty filter is the default, and the default arrives switched on. So you stop asking for texture and start forbidding the smoothness: glossy, airbrushed, plastic skin, waxy skin, CGI, 3D render, digital painting, over-smooth, uncanny, doll-like, wax figure. Then 8 words come out of the prompt for good, because each one of the 8 drags the render back toward wax. Beautiful. Glowing skin. Flawless. Perfect. Radiant. Photorealistic. Hyper-detailed skin. 4K face close-up. Any 1 of those 8 undoes the whole 44-term list underneath it. The probability that a render comes back waxy with none of the 8 in it is not zero. Most people price it at zero, which is why they keep blaming the seed.

The negative list stops the fake skin. It does not produce the real skin. That is a separate half of the page, and it runs 9 terms: documentary film, 35 mm, natural skin texture, visible pores, unretouched, natural light, negative fill, slow deliberate movement, single subject. Negative fill is the one people skip: something black on the shadow side of a face, killing the bounce that flattens it out. You cannot prompt it back into existence. You can only ask for it by name. Slow deliberate movement is the same deal. Fast movement gives the renderer an excuse, and the excuse comes back as blur and as an extra limb. Single subject, because 2 subjects is 2 chances to drift.

A close-up is where the wax shows first, and a 35 mm close-up shows it fastest. So on a face you do not write an adjective, you write biology. 7 cues, and they go in together: visible pores, fine peach fuzz catching the rim light, capillary redness on the cheeks and nose, a slight oil sheen on the T-zone only, fine laugh lines at the corners of the eyes, uneven melanin, no makeup. The T-zone only matters. Even oil is a filter. Uneven melanin is the one that finally reads as skin, because real faces are not one colour. And no makeup, which is the hardest note to hold, because everything around you keeps asking for the polished version. Seven cues, one frame, and out.

44 terms in Tier 1, and the one people forget is the last: looking at the lens.

The second tier is 17 terms of anatomy, and it is tagged for nude work. This project is not. Deformed breasts, mismatched size, deformed nipples, deformed genitals, wrong size, wrong shape, inconsistent proportions, mutated limbs, disfigured body, extra nipples, fused digits, asymmetric face, crossed eyes, uneven eyes, elongated neck, distorted torso, double image. 17 terms, and they stay in the file and out of the call. Not squeamishness. Every word in a prompt is a vote, and a vote for a thing you never asked for is a vote against the thing you did. So the page is written as tiers rather than as taste: 44 that always run, 17 that wait for a project that needs them, 9 positives and 8 bans. A tired version of you at 1am does not have to make a judgement call.

Under the whole page there is one sentence, and it has outlived everything else. Design the shot around what the model cannot do. If the shot needs a face, keep it medium-framed and short. If it needs a hand, shoot the wrist or the back of it. The probability that a renderer gets a hand right on its own is not zero. Most people price it at zero, which is why they keep re-running the same failure louder. A redesign costs one minute. A re-render costs the afternoon, and you ship the six-fingered version anyway. The discipline that has put 210 deployed systems under twelve countries is the same discipline that runs on a 44-term negative list: fix the shot, not the prompt. Write the list once. Hold it everywhere. Then go and shoot the thing you can actually get.