base image

A base image is a reference picture you settle on before making a video, one that fixes the character, background, lighting, and color palette all in a single frame. It plays a role similar to concept art an art director draws before filming a movie, or the wallpaper and lighting samples you pick out before decorating a room.

There's a specific reason this matters. When you generate images separately for each scene with AI, it's common for lighting or color to drift slightly even for the same character. But if you first create one base image and then request scenes from different angles using that image as the reference, the lighting and color stay consistent across scenes. This lets you get polished results without needing a separate color-matching pass afterward.

In the end, a base image is the first step in a two-stage workflow: create it with an image generation tool first, then feed it into a video generation tool to produce multiple shots.

The article describes an ad director making a 30-second commercial with Wan3.0 who, instead of feeding in separate character and prop references, first created a single base image that packed in the chicken and unicorn characters along with the lighting and color palette all in one frame. Using this image as the reference to generate shots from multiple angles, they were able to skip color correction entirely. It's easy to mistake a base image for a finished ad scene, but it's worth remembering it's actually just the starting-point image for producing multiple scenes afterward.

1. Enter a prompt into an image generation tool that covers the character, background, lighting, and color palette all at once to create a single reference image. Example: "A freely roaming cartoon-style chicken character, sunset lighting, warm orange color tones, countryside background"
2. Feed the finished image into a video generation model as an input.
3. Follow up with scene-specific prompts like "Keeping this image's lighting and color, generate a scene of the character walking."
4. After generating multiple scenes, check whether the lighting and color stay consistent without drifting.