One grumpy fox in every film

The fox has to look and act like the same fox in every picture and film we make, and so far that has meant hundreds of them. They run from Tarantino stills and drawn cards to films of him in a real launderette, a lift and a Brooklyn street. The reel below is cut from them, fast, to a beat.

The fox is a brand asset, and a brand asset only works if people know it straight away. If he looks a little different each time, or acts a little different, he stops being ours and becomes a cartoon fox. So keeping him the same is the job. It has two halves: how he looks, and who he is.

Start with how he looks. Every picture and every film now starts from the same reference picture of him, standing on a white background. The model copies what it is shown, so a different picture of him, picked because it suits the scene, gives it a different fox to copy. When a film needs more, it gets pictures of that same fox from the front and the back, never another version of him.

He is also described in words, and the words are written once and kept in the fox files every prompt is built from. Part of it reads: "a large ROUND head, a very SHORT blunt muzzle, huge half-lidded amber eyes, a flat closed unimpressed mouth, a compact stocky build". Then the things he is not: "He is NOT a realistic wild animal: do NOT lengthen the muzzle, do NOT give him fangs, do NOT pin his ears back." Retype the words from memory and one of them slips, and he slips with it, so they always come from those files.

The models pull him away from himself in a few known ways, and every prompt writes against each of them. Put "a realistic fox" in a prompt and you get a real fox, with a long thin muzzle and a lean body, so realistic is only allowed to describe his fur. Without the hoodie and jeans the video model turns him into an animal on all fours, and clothed he stands upright like a person. Dressed and upright, the model also makes him bigger and heavier, so every prompt says "compact small frame". Shot side-on, or with his head bowed over a desk, his muzzle grows long and pointed, so he faces the camera, or three-quarters on, and only his eyes look down.

On the older video model he drifted after about seven seconds, so the films were five second clips joined together, and every clip painted his face a little differently. The newer model makes a 30 second film in one run, so he has one face from the first frame to the last. When I do join two takes, I join them on a close-up of him alone. His size against the people around him changes from take to take, and a close-up hides it.

Then there is who he is. Paul put it like this: "It's not just consistency visual, it's also the character, his grumpiness. That's important too." It is the half that is easy to miss.

Every word in the prompt reaches his face, not only the words about it. Ask for a feeling and the model acts it with his whole face: "aggressive" makes him angry, and "thrilled" turns him into a grinning cartoon cub with his tongue out. So I never write a feeling onto him. I write what his face does: "eyes alert under flat lids, brows a little low, completely bored expression". And the list of things the model must not do says "never wide eyes, never grinning, never tongue out".

He still wants things, and that is what the films are about. He wants his hoodie clean, he wants the sandwich, he wants the ice cream, he wants to go into the shop. I show the wanting through what he does with his body, like the way he holds the cone or the slow lean in, and his face stays flat.

And he loses. The dryer shrinks his hoodie, the gull takes his sandwich, the scoop falls off his cone, the doors open for a pigeon and not for him. Each film is one simple story where the joke is on him. A grumpy character who wins is just smug. One who loses and takes it without a flicker is funny, and it is the same joke every time, which is part of what makes him him.

Many of the films end the same way, with him staring flat into the lens. In the reel that stare is the thread. It cuts back to his face between the other shots, the way a football film keeps cutting back to one player.

He is the same in pictures. When a picture needs a group, say a team of agents, every fox in it has his face, with the same heavy-lidded eyes, told apart only by their clothes. A generic cartoon fox beside him would undo the work.

Before anything goes out, I check it. Count his arms, paws and feet, and say the count. Models add a third paw more often than you would think, and it ruins an otherwise good picture.

Look at his face at full size beside the reference. A sheet of small frames will tell you a film runs well, but it can't tell you his eyes have gone soft and lost their detail.

Check that there is one fox. Models like to add a second one in the background, a reflection or a poster of him on the wall.

Watch the whole film, not a frame from it. A walk to camera that looks right in a still can be him stepping on the spot for two seconds and then rushing at the lens.

Write it down. When the fox drifts, the cause and the fix go into the rules I read before the next job. That is most of how he stays the same. Each new prompt starts from those rules.