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FilmSkool — a free film school

Runway Just Changed Filmmaking Forever! (Gen-4 Reference Tutorial)

A tutorial on Runway Gen-4's reference-image feature, which locks a character, prop, or location across multiple generations by feeding the model images instead of describing them in text. Covers how to prepare and combine references for reliable results.

Evan Ezquer | AI Filmmaker · 9 min · Intermediate · AIF · AI Filmmaking · 2025

What you take away

Can use reference images in Runway Gen-4 to hold a character or location consistent across shots.

Watch it

Filed under

Science fiction to study

Books for the craft underneath

Character Animation Crash Course! — Eric Goldberg
The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation — Ken A. Priebe
Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects — Thomas G. Smith
Digital Lighting and Rendering — Jeremy Birn
The Visual Effects Arsenal — Bill Byrne
To Infinity and Beyond! — Karen Paik

Run the models yourself

Corsair 128GB DDR5 kit — For Unreal, caches and twelve open applications
Intel Core Ultra 9 285K — Quick Sync, which some codecs still love
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X — 16 cores — the sweet spot for a cutting room
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 — The sensible half-price render card
NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada — Workstation card, single slot, 20GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 — Still the best value in used compute

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