Look presets

Every preset in the Look slot of Create video, with what it adds to the shot. Look covers the grade and texture of the picture, what the lens and film do to it, and effects that happen in the shot.

Using look presets

In Create video, click Look in the row of buttons above the prompt, select one or more presets and click Add. Each preset appears as a chip in the prompt; click its × to take it off. You can also type @ and a preset's name in the prompt to place it at that point in the sentence. A preset adds a written direction to your prompt, so it works with any video model that takes a prompt, and it has no weight to set.

Combining presets

• One genre look per clip. It sets the whole picture, and two compete for the same grade.
• Optical effects stack well on a genre look: Film Noir with Film Grain and Vignette, or Blockbuster Gloss with Anamorphic Flare.
• A visual effect is an event, so give it room: a short clip, one effect, and a prompt that says what it happens to (the statue, the car).
• For a series of ads or trailers, keep the same look presets on every clip so they cut together as one campaign.

Genre look

The visual language of a film tradition, a medium or a material: the whole grade, contrast and texture of the shot at once.

Film Noir

Low-key and high-contrast: one hard key cut by blinds or a window frame, deep shadow doing most of the drawing.

Neo-Noir

Noir's hard keys and isolated blocking, but with colour: sodium, neon and wet asphalt instead of silver.

Tech Noir

Noir grammar fused with technology: rain, hard keys, screens as practicals, a city that never turns off.

German Expressionism

The set as a state of mind: forced-perspective corridors, painted shadows, angles that refuse to sit square.

French New Wave

Fiction shot on real streets in available light, handheld and unfussy, with the seams left visible.

Cinéma Vérité

Available light and zoom-to-find framing, with the camera's presence acknowledged rather than hidden.

Documentary

Observational coverage mixed with interview and archive: unstyled light, real rooms, nothing pretending otherwise.

Found Footage

Images presented as a recording made by someone inside the events, with all the faults that implies.

Behind the Scenes

The making left in frame: C-stands, flags, the back of the set wall, crew standing in the shot.

Arthouse

Room left for thought: a locked-off camera, odd headroom, natural light and a shot that outlasts its event.

Blockbuster Gloss

High-contrast, billboard-readable coverage: designed weather, clean separation, every frame sellable.

Spaghetti Western

Western iconography restaged wide and dusty: ochre land, extreme faces against extreme distance.

Wuxia

Martial chivalry staged in landscape: misted bamboo, silk in motion, figures small against scenery.

Giallo

Italian thriller grammar: hyper-saturated primaries gelled through windows, gloved hands, lurid dread.

Cosmic Horror

Dread built out of human insignificance: vast scale, slightly wrong geometry, a figure too small to matter.

Southern Gothic

The American South as a humid optical problem: late gold light, decay, air you can see.

Dystopian

The civic system as antagonist: used concrete, haze, signage, and a person processed by architecture.

Magical Realism

An impossible event treated as unremarkable inside an otherwise ordinary, recognisable world.

Dreamcore

Soft liminal interiors: empty pools, suburban halls, light with no plausible source.

Weirdcore

The familiar rendered incorrectly: early-web compression, low-res artefacts, an image that feels mis-remembered.

Vaporwave

Pastel and low-contrast: pink-to-cyan gradients, marble busts, palms and empty mall light.

Maximalism

Density as the argument: too much colour, too much pattern, ornament in every corner of the frame.

Video Game

Playable camera logic borrowed wholesale: a follow cam, an isometric view, a first-person eyeline.

Photographic

The frame treated as a print: one decisive moment, composed and held like a still.

Deliberate Amateur

Badness on purpose: hunting zooms, cheap video, wrong white balance, the camcorder aesthetic played straight.

Marble

Stone as flesh: veined white, cold polish, a figure caught between statue and person.

Origami

Paper as lawful sculpture: creases, flat planar colour, a world folded rather than built.

Paper Craft

The world as pulp: torn stock, visible fibre, figures cut out and layered.

Ink Riot

Liquid calligraphy thrown through the air around an otherwise still subject.

Optical effect

What the lens, the film stock or the sensor does to the picture: focus, flares, grain, colour processes, unusual cameras and in-camera tricks.

Shallow Focus

A narrow band of sharpness, with everything nearer and further dissolving away.

Deep Focus

Near and far planes both held sharp, so the whole depth of the frame stays readable.

Rack Focus

The sharp plane moved from one subject to another during the shot, redirecting attention.

Focal Shift

The plane of sharpness travelling through the scene, discovering things as it goes.

Bokeh

The character of the out-of-focus areas: how highlights render as discs and how they roll off.

Anamorphic Flare

A horizontal streak drawn across the frame when a bright point hits anamorphic glass.

Chromatic Aberration

Colour fringing where the lens fails to bring every wavelength to the same point.

Lens Distortion

Space warped by the optics until straight lines bow or stretch toward the corners.

Vignette

The corners darkened so the frame closes inward on its centre.

Halation

A warm bloom around bright highlights, light scattering back through the emulsion.

Light Leak

Unfiltered light reaching the emulsion, washing streaks of colour across the frame.

Random Glow

Unmotivated orbs and analogue leaks, a frame haunted by lamps that will not sit still.

Light Flash

A brief blowout to white, used as a punctuation mark inside the shot.

Bubbles

Air filled with little lenses: soap films that refract whatever is behind them.

Film Grain

The random silver texture of the stock itself, sitting over the whole image.

Bleach Bypass

Silver retained in processing: contrast up, colour drained, grain hardened.

Cross Process

Film developed in the wrong chemistry: skewed contrast and colour crossovers in the shadows.

Filmic Faded

A print emulated: blacks lifted off zero, highlights rolled, nothing reaching the extremes.

Vintage Film

The image treated as old chemistry: faded dyes, softened contrast, halation and wear.

Overexposed

Values allowed to clip and bloom toward white, detail surrendered in the highlights.

Monochrome

Chromatic information removed, so tone and contrast carry the whole image.

Day for Night

Daylight photographed to read as night while the terrain stays legible.

Acid

A ruined print: burned chroma, melting edges, dyes left out in the sun too long.

Infrared

Near-infrared reflectance, where foliage goes white and skin turns waxy.

Thermal

Heat mapped as image: warm bodies bright against a cold, featureless world.

Night Vision

Image intensification: green phosphor, heavy noise, blown highlights.

X-Ray

Seeing through the surface, as though density were the only thing the camera recorded.

Photogrammetry

Geometry reconstructed from overlapping photographs, holes and stretched texture included.

Datamosh

Codec failure on purpose: motion continuing after the picture it belonged to has gone.

Video Feedback

A camera pointed at its own output, so the image recurses into itself.

Slit-Scan

Exposure through a narrow slit while things move, so time is drawn along one axis.

Kaleidoscope

The image fragmented and mirrored into radial symmetry.

Optical Trip

An optical state rather than a grade: light trails, doubled edges, walls that breathe.

Altered State

The mind as the location: smear, afterimage and a world that will not hold still.

Colour Shift

A change of colour state the audience is meant to notice happening.

Double Exposure

Two recordings sharing one frame, each showing through the other.

Duplication

The same performer present in the frame more than once.

Selfie Twin

Two of the same face in a phone-arm frame, identity doubled at arm's length.

Masking

A matte or in-frame object cutting the picture into a shape.

Iris

A circular mask closing or opening on the picture, pointing at what matters.

Aspect Ratio Switch

The visible boundaries of the image changing, so the frame itself becomes an event.

Forced Perspective

Camera position and set geometry arranged so sizes lie convincingly.

Diorama

A physical scale model photographed so it stands in for the real thing.

Shadow Box

Layered cut-outs standing in for depth, the world built in flat planes.

Object Portal

A prop treated as a wormhole: a bag, a screen, a door leading somewhere impossible.

Smash and Grab

Impact as coverage: breaking glass, a snatch, handheld chaos.

Kinetic Typography

Words placed in the world of the shot as objects rather than captions.

Floating UI

Readable interface and data suspended in the space of the shot.

Projections

A pictured image thrown onto a surface or a body, so it wears another image.

Collage

A frame assembled from torn, cut and mixed pieces.

Mixed Media

Live action combined with type, illustration and stock into one surface.

Generative

Process made visible: forms grown by rule, particles and iteration.

Particles

Air filled with countable bits (dust, ash, motes, debris), each one catching light.

Sticker Peel

The image lifted off its backing, with adhesive shine and a curling edge.

Anthropomorphic

An object or animal staged as a performer, given intent and timing.

Many Eyes

The frame filled with looking: extra pupils where they should not be.

Cyclops Lens

One giant iris looking back: fisheye treated as a monstrous eye.

Dirty Lens

A front element nobody wiped: dust, smears and spatter that stay invisible until something bright shines through them.

Cracked Lens

A fractured front element, the break splitting and refracting whatever light passes through it.

Focus Change

Sharpness handed from one distance to another during the shot.

Lens Flare

Stray light bouncing inside the barrel, throwing ghosts and streaks across the image.

Visual effect

An event that happens in the shot: a transformation, a transition, something exploding, melting or floating.

Set Transition

The location changing in camera: walls walking, architecture rewriting itself, one space becoming another with no cut.

Morphing

One shape or face flowing continuously into another with no cut between them.

Transformation

A body, room or object becoming something else on camera.

Scale Shift

A body changing size against a room that stays exactly as it was.

Floating Fall

A body hanging in a slow drop: delayed gravity, hair and cloth rising.

Building Explosion

A structure going up behind the subject, shockwave and debris, and no looking back.

Car Explosion

A vehicle detonating into a fireball while the subject walks clear.

Disintegration

A body coming apart into particles and drifting off.

Invisible

A presence you can only read from what it displaces.

Melting

A form losing its structure and running like wax.

Push Through Glass

The camera arriving at a pane and continuing through it.

Set on Fire

A figure engulfed, still standing while it burns.

Tentacles

Limbs arriving from somewhere off-frame and taking the scene.

Turning to Metal

A surface becoming liquid chrome, reflecting everything it used to absorb.

Wind to Face

A blast of air arriving head-on: hair, cloth and features pushed back by it.

Levitation

A body leaving the ground with no visible means of doing so.

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