Series drift is usually blamed on the model. Look at the measure instead. The character was described from memory at every job, and memory cuts generously. “Long black hair with an orchid pin” in frame one becomes “dark silky hair” by frame four, and the audience watches a stranger take her place. The repair is an atelier habit: write her down once, on a salon card you paste rather than retype.
Five fixed lines, always in order
Age — a number, and in this salon a mature one. Hair — colour, length and one habitual style. Build — two or three words. Face — one or two details that endure every crop. Signature — the pin, the stud, the detail that survives any light. Everything else belongs to the changing line: outfit, corner, hour, screen light. Changing lines are meant to change. Card lines are not.
State the lines plainly and positively; adjectives are reinterpreted at every attempt, concrete descriptions survive. And version the card: when she is deliberately changed, save the new text as version two with a date, so an old set can be remade exactly as it was.
Working from the card
Pair the card with changing lines that share one setting and one light, generate at the standard 6-credit cost, and keep the best third. Spend on repairs, transfers and upscales only after the cull. When a frame returns off character, the cause is almost always on the card: a changing line contradicted a fixed line, or a line was too vague to hold her.
What a card cannot do
It cannot hold a character who was never measured. Measure her on paper first. The card is not where the imagination happens; it is where the imagination is kept, frame after frame, bolt after bolt.