Verified against ChatGPT · 2026-09-10

1987 hand-painted film poster (couple)

A painted poster, not a photograph — the one prompt that drops photorealism on purpose, and gets a higher hit rate for it.

ChatGPT (GPT Image)Nano Banana (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image)Gemini app

The prompt

Ready to copy — highlighted parts are example details you can swap.

A hand-painted 1987 style Hindi film poster showing a couple as two large painted faces above a smaller action vignette

Use my uploaded photo, which has two people in it. Anchor each painted face to its counterpart by position — left stays left, right stays right. Do not merge, average, swap or blend the two identities. Keep each face recognisably theirs: bone structure, nose, eyes, lips, skin tone and age. The painting style may simplify surface detail, but no proportion may be altered — do not slim a face, narrow a nose, enlarge eyes or lighten skin in the name of style. Change only hair, clothes, pose, composition and background. Make this a hand-painted Indian film poster from 1987, painted in oils on board by a poster artist and then printed on cheap paper: visible brushwork, heightened saturated colour, simplified planes on the faces with hard-edged highlights, and the mildly exaggerated drama of commercial poster painting. Not a photograph, not a digital illustration, not an airbrush render. Classic two-hero arrangement — both faces large in the upper two thirds, one slightly higher and turned three-quarters, the other lower and more frontal, overlapping at the shoulder, with painted rays radiating behind the heads. Below, a smaller full-figure vignette of the same two people in a dramatic pose against a rain-lashed hillside with a speeding jeep, painted looser and less detailed. Leave a wide clear band across the lower third for a title, and render any lettering as plausible English poster type, smaller and softer where it cannot be crisp. No Devanagari, no real film's title or logo. Printed cheap in 1987: slightly misregistered colour separations with thin coloured fringes, visible halftone dots, yellowed faded paper, a soft crease down one side. Vertical 3:4 poster.

Take it further: the video prompt

Animates the photo above.

An image-to-video brief for Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0, Runway Gen-4.5 that continues this exact still, not a new scene — paste it alongside the generated photo.

Animate this hand-painted film poster as a teaser, not as live footage — both of us stay painted, not photorealistic, for every frame, with each painted face recognisably ours by position, left stays left, right stays right, and no proportion drifting toward a more generic or idealised face. The only motion is restrained and specific to the lower vignette: the painted rain keeps falling in the same streaked style as the still and the jeep's headlamps flicker once; in the upper two-thirds our painted expressions hold almost perfectly still, as if the artist's brushwork is settling rather than a scene playing out. Camera: a slow push on a slider toward the upper two hero faces, the same restraint a real trailer teaser would use, never fast enough to blur the painted brushwork into a photograph. Keep the visible brushwork, the heightened saturated colour and the hard-edged painted highlights exactly as strong throughout — the image must not sharpen into photorealism as it plays. Keep the halftone dots, the yellowed paper and the misregistered colour fringes exactly as strong for the full runtime. Add a low, distant film-orchestra swell and falling rain — no legible dialogue, no new title reveal beyond the still. Output: 6 seconds, one unbroken shot, no cuts, vertical 3:4 matching the still exactly, loop-safe.

Why this works

This is the only prompt that abandons photorealism, and that is strategy rather than style. Painted faces tolerate imperfection: a brushstroke slightly off reads as an artist’s hand, where the same error in a photorealistic render reads as an AI artefact. So a poster returns a usable image more often. The risk is that "stylised" gives the model licence to idealise, which is why the identity lock separates surface simplification, allowed, from proportion change, forbidden.

What you get back

A saturated painted two-hero poster with visible brushwork, a lower action vignette, halftone dots and faded paper. Higher hit rate than the photorealistic prompts.

Verified against

ChatGPT GPT Image · 2026-09-10

Nano Banana / Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Gemini app · 2026-09-10

Changelog

2026-09-09 — Written for the September 2026 80s photo trend.
2026-09-10 — Rewritten as a single copy-and-go paragraph with no fill-ins, and paired with an example image.