# Acting presets — the emotion wheel, gaze, and eye-life > **The wordings moved to the server (2026-09-14).** This file still decides > *which* preset to reach for — that judgement is the part that needs a reader. > What it no longer carries is the sentence each id compiles to: those were > tuned against real renders, and a prompt written from a remembered copy of > one renders worse than a prompt that pastes it. Pass the id to > `picsart_film_compile_prompt` and the server pastes the sentence. > > This is not a style rule. Measured on a real shipped run, every one of seven > shots had its size, angle and field of view reworded in exactly this way. The vocabulary behind every performance decision in the pipeline: the review board's per-character direction controls, the retired shot designer's Acting tab, and the text-choice fallback. What reaches the model is the shot block's emotion — one or two words per visible face (`PROMPT-BLOCKS.md`, Part 2), and **the chat picks them from this wheel while writing the block; the user is never asked to choose an emotion on a board or in a menu** (2026-09-10 — the review board's per-character emotion picks are not needed and are listed as a widget change to make; the fifteen-block *Character acting* block this file used to fill is gone). The fuller skeleton below is the chat's own vocabulary for reading a moment, not prompt text. The skeleton per character: state · what he wants · what he hides · body rhythm · 2–4 visible habits · what changes across the shot · one unspoken inner line — plus eye-life. The emotion wheel fills the *state* and *body rhythm* slots; the direction lane of the shot card fills wants/hides/change; the inner line is authored fresh per shot. ## The wheel — eight emotions × three intensities Intensity is how much of it is **visible**, not how much is felt. Intensity 1 is the most cinematic and the default: the camera is close enough to see suppression. **One shot in the film is the exception — the peak.** The story head's `Peak` line (`../../film-development/references/DRAMATURGY.md`) names the beat the film is built toward; the shot whose story paragraph covers that beat plays it. There, and only there, the visible reaction **is** the point: a viewer catches the feeling off the character's face, so a face holding it in leaves them nothing to catch. The peak shot takes **intensity 3**, carries no `hides` slot, and names the physical sign in plain words — eyes filling, a breath that breaks, a laugh that gets away, hands that find the other person. Every other shot in the film keeps intensity 1. Suppression everywhere is right; suppression at the peak throws away what the whole film was built to deliver. **This wheel is the only emotion vocabulary.** The review board used to offer six states of its own — `neutral`, `tense`, `wary`, `angry`, `relief`, `broken` — so a character directed on the board could not be described in the words the acting block compiles from. Only `angry` had a counterpart here (`anger`); the other five are **retired**, not aliased, because each was a blend rather than a wheel position and guessing which one is worse than dropping it. A payload carrying one is treated as an unknown id: the control reads "as generated" and the user picks again. A surface with no intensity control of its own uses **intensity 2 (open)** — the one an audience reads without the camera being close. Only a surface that lets the user say "hold it in" should be sending intensity 1. **Ids:** `joy` · `sadness` · `anger` · `fear` · `surprise` · `disgust` · `trust` · `hope` *(The sentence each id compiles to now lives server-side. Pass the id to `picsart_film_compile_prompt` and it pastes the tuned wording; never write that sentence yourself.)* ## Gaze target — always named Every character's entry names where the eyes live: `gaze locked on ` / `gaze avoiding , finding ` / `gaze on the task, flicking to at `. An unnamed gaze is where generated faces go dead. The listener in a dialogue shot gets a gaze line too — listening is a performance. ## Eye-life Standing fragment, appended per character and tuned by ONE word — the blink rate. Three settings: composed, strained, and a predatory/frozen one to use rarely. The compiler holds the wordings and picks by the character's state. Catchlights are always requested, in all three; a face without them reads as rendered, which is why the fragment is standing rather than optional. ## The living shot — rules that keep frames from dying Four standing rules, written into the acting block whenever they apply: - **The reaction starts before the line ends.** The listener's face begins to answer while the speaker is still talking — brow, breath, a weight shift. Reactions that wait for the line to finish read as turn-taking robots. - **Hands are always busy.** Every character holds a task — coiling a rope, wiping a cup, worrying a strap. Idle hands are where duplicated fingers and dead performances live; a task also gives the actor something to *stop doing* at the dramatic beat. - **Micro-life every one to two seconds.** Somewhere in frame, something small moves: a blink, steam, a curtain, a background figure shifting weight. A frame with no micro-life for two seconds reads as a freeze even when the camera moves. - **Stillness is held tension, never "nobody moves."** Calming phrases freeze the render. Write what the stillness *costs*: "he holds himself still, breath shallow, knuckles whitening on the rail" — the body working to not move is a performance; absence of motion is a bug. ## Hidden intention The `hides` slot pairs the wheel with its mask: `hides fear` under anger, `hides relief` under scolding, `hides recognition` under politeness. The mask is what the face performs; the emotion is what leaks. Write both, in that relationship: `shame at intensity 1, masked as concentration`. ## Without boards Nothing changes: no question is asked either way. The chat reads the story's paragraph for the moment, picks the emotion and its intensity from the wheel, and writes the one or two words into the shot block (2026-09-10; until then this section asked the user one emotion question per speaking character per scene).