Higgsfield Acting Director

[OFFICIAL — Higgsfield "Hell Grind" open-source brief] — the performance system behind Higgsfield's 95-minute AI feature film, adapted to this repo's prompt surfaces.

The core axiom of the entire system: acting is BEHAVIOR under pressure, not a display of emotion. A character wants something, something is in the way, and they act to get it. Emotion is a byproduct of that struggle — never the thing you write directly.

This is a layer on top of ../higgsfield-seedance/SKILL.md: the paragraph this skill produces goes into the PERFORMANCE / CHARACTER ACTING block of an otherwise normal Seedance prompt. It does not change camera, light, wardrobe, or grade.

QUICK FACTS

Generated-checked block (scripts/build_index.py verifies anchors). Routing aids — read the linked sections for the rules.

• Write the objective (a verb aimed at a partner), never the state — "make him confess", never "be angry" →
• 2–4 beat changes per scene, each one visible in behavior: a pause, a posture change, a tempo change, a shift of gaze. Unchanged behavior for the whole shot = played flat →
• Listening beats speaking. The reaction starts before the partner's line ends; a hard question earns a micro-pause before the answer →
• The body carries the biography: center of gravity, tempo, openness, breath — set all four before any psychology →
• Business — a physical task the hands are doing — kills theatricality; the strongest accent in a scene is the moment the character stops it →
• Distance is drama; a change of distance is a beat change. Status is what you DO, and status breaks are the most interesting thing in a performance →
• The master profile is 150–220 words, one paragraph, fixed block order, written once per character and then rewritten per scene — never pasted →
• Every tic carries a trigger; every mask carries a crack — at least one "However, when X…" clause per profile →
• Eye life is mandatory and never optional — saccades, blink quality, live catchlights, eyes-lead-thought. Dead eyes are the number-one tell of AI acting →
• Scene adaptation transforms, never deletes: a behavior that can't physically happen is displaced into another outlet, not removed →
• The voice prompt is locked — one per character, pasted verbatim into the audio field, never adapted per scene →
• States, not transitions. Models fail process and nail state: "mid-throw, arm extended", not "reaches in, pulls out, winds up" →
• Ensemble reactions travel in a wave, never in sync; the strong are still and quiet, the weak fidget and shout →
• 15 named bad-acting symptoms with prompt-level fixes, and a 0–5 self-check scale — aim every hero shot at 4+ →

Where this sits among the repo's performance tools

Use this skill to decide what the body does; use FACS to specify which muscles do it in a close-up. They compose — a FACS beat schedule inside a paragraph written by these rules is the highest-resolution performance the platform supports.

Part I — The craft

What good acting is

Truthful behavior under imaginary circumstances. Not depicted emotions, not recited text, not "expressive faces."

The five pillars of every scene

Every character in every scene decomposes into five elements. If one is missing, the performance falls apart.

1. Objective. What the character wants IN THIS SCENE, RIGHT NOW, FROM A SPECIFIC PERSON. Always a verb aimed at the partner: make him confess · beg a week's extension · convince her I'm not afraid. Never a state ("be angry", "feel guilty") — states cannot be played. Behind the scene objective sits a super-objective: what the character wants across the whole story, with every scene objective a step toward it.

2. Obstacle and stakes. What prevents them — external (another character wants the opposite; witnesses in the room; two hours to deadline) or internal (pride won't let them beg; they don't believe their own words). Always answer what happens if I do NOT get what I want? — and the answer must frighten the character. The higher the cost of failure, the more taut the scene.

3. Tactics. The concrete method of pursuing the objective right now, as an action verb: press · charm · shame · plead · provoke · bargain · threaten · stall. When a tactic fails, a living person changes it. One tactic for a whole scene is dead acting.

4. Beats. The smallest unit of action: the stretch during which the character wants one thing and pursues it one way. A beat ends when the objective is achieved, the tactic fails, new information arrives, or the balance of power shifts. Every beat change must be VISIBLE in behavior — a pause, a change of posture, a change of speech tempo, a shift of gaze. A good scene has 2–4 beat changes.

5. Subtext. What the character actually thinks and wants, as opposed to what they say. Subtext is not performed — it leaks out on its own when the character plays the true objective while speaking the false text. Buildable markers: questions that aren't questions · repetitions (asking the same thing — they don't believe the answer) · abrupt topic changes · jokes at the wrong moment (a shield against vulnerability) · answers that are too short ("Fine." "Sure." — a closed door).

Listening and reaction

Performance lives not in the lines but between them. Four observable markers to write in:

1. The reaction starts before the partner's line ends. A person grasps the point mid-phrase — the face and body already answer. A neutral face until the line ends, then "switching on", is dead acting.
2. Thought before word. Before a hard answer there is a micro-pause — the person visibly decides what to say. Instant answers at uniform speed read as memorized text.
3. The assessment moment. After news, a threat, or an insult, the character needs time to digest — from a fraction of a second to a long pause. Cinema lives on close-ups of these assessments: a face, a defocused gaze, the world swimming.
4. Contagion from the partner. Tempo, volume, and energy shift in response: a shout is answered either with a counter-shout or with pointed quiet — but answered, not continued over.

The body

Physical state before psychology. Set four parameters for every character before any inner life:

• Center of gravity — high (chest, chin: confidence, aggression, status) or low (shoulders, slouch: fatigue, fear, submission).
• Tempo — fast/ragged (nervousness, stimulant energy) or slow/economical (control, threat — the most dangerous people move least).
• Openness — squared shoulders and open palms, versus crossed arms, dropped head, closed poses.
• Breath — high and rapid (panic) versus low and slow (control). Breath is the most honest indicator of state, and sound must match physics: someone who just ran cannot speak on a steady voice.

Business — the physical task. A character almost always needs a DOING. They don't "have a conversation" — they fix an engine, count money, cook, wipe a glass, and talk over the top of it. Business kills fake theatricality (the hands are busy with truth), creates rhythm (pauses fill with action), and generates subtext (how a person counts money says more than the words).

The interrupted-action rule. The strongest accent is when a character stops the business. If he was slicing bread and stopped at a phrase, the phrase became an event. Use the stop as punctuation.

Proxemics — distance as drama. The distance between characters is a visible graph of their relationship:

A threat whispered 10 cm from a face is scarier than one shouted across a room. Scene drama is often just the story of distance: who closes it, who breaks it, who freezes. A change of distance is a change of beat — and it must be written in metres, per the measurable-language rule in ../higgsfield-seedance/SKILL.md.

Status — the invisible hierarchy. Status is what you DO, not who you are.

• High status: an immobile head, slow movements, long gazes, pauses before answering, taking up space, touching other people's things.
• Low status: fussing, frequent self-touching (face, hair), broken speech, filler-laughter, asking permission with the eyes.

The most interesting thing in a performance is a status break: the boss who shows fear for one second; the underling who suddenly stops smiling. A powerful scene shape is enter high and collapse, or enter low and flip the room.

How good acting sounds

• Rhythm is written in the text — deliver it precisely; fast ≠ mushy.
• Overlaps are normal (lines stepping on each other's tails), but key words stay clean.
• Volume contrast: the most frightening things are said the quietest. Shouting is the currency of the weak; the character who owns the scene lowers the volume and everyone leans in.
• Pauses are events, not holes — a pause is legal only if something happens inside it: an assessment, a decision, a refusal to answer.
• Real speech has litter: interruptions, half-heard words, repetitions, unfinished phrases. Perfectly constructed sentences kill street truth.

Part II — Writing the acting

The acting master profile

Every recurring character gets one master profile — the permanent source of truth about how they act. Written once, then adapted per scene. Target: 150–220 words, one flowing paragraph, fully observable and filmable.

Block order is fixed:

Character acting as [NAME]. [Build, physique, posture — the body as a document of their
biography]. [The psychological engine in one clause — the inner drive that explains the
physicality]. Vocal profile: [pitch/timbre, accent/origin, pace and delivery manner, and how
the voice breaks or shifts under emotion]. Key physical habits and tics: [signature tic with
its trigger; stress tic with its trigger; concealment behavior — what they do to hide what
they feel; the facial mask and the exact condition under which it cracks]. Eye life: [blink
quality and rate, scanning pattern, gaze-before-head, catchlights]. Walking style: [the gait
as characterization — named and specific, with weight, rhythm, and foot placement]. However,
when [emotional trigger], [the transformation — how the posture, gait, and face change].
[Optional: the softening target — the one person or thing that makes the face genuinely soften].

Rules for each block:

1. Only observable behavior. Every inner state needs a body marker. Never "he is nervous" — write the trembling lower lip, the heavy swallow, the long inhale through the mouth and sharp exhale through pursed lips.
2. Every tic has a trigger. Not "he cracks his knuckles" but "he cracks his knuckles during mundane conversations to fake confidence." Format: [tic] + [when/why]. Tics without triggers are decoration; tics with triggers are dramaturgy.
3. Name the gait. A coined name in quotes anchors the biomechanics — a "power-walk", a "peacock strut", a "gallery walk", a "battering-ram stride", a "dreadnought pace" — then unpack it: weight, step, what the torso and arms do, what the head does.
4. Build in the mask AND the crack. The single most cinematic device in a profile is the conditional transformation: the facade, plus the precise trigger that collapses it. A dominant swagger that crumbles into a childlike slouch when rejected; stern discipline that melts into a radiant smile at one specific person. Every profile carries at least one "However, when X — …" clause. A character playing two truths at once is the difference between a puppet and a person.
5. One softening target. Where it fits, give the face exactly one person, animal, or object it genuinely softens for. One — not two. This humanizes without diluting.
6. No wardrobe. Clothing lives in the scene/look block, never in the acting profile. The profile must survive any costume change.
7. No camera, no color. Acting drives performance, face, voice, and motion only.
8. Physique carries biography. Build and posture tell the backstory — a build "weathered from past struggles", shoulders "perpetually tense", a posture "over-corrected to project authority". Profession, past injuries, and self-image must be readable in the body.

Age is not a profile field. Engine rule 1 (../higgsfield-seedance/ENGINE-RULES.md) is age-blind characters, and the content filter tightens sharply on age words. Carry the same information through build, wear, posture, and voice — "a body that has already been repaired twice", "a working-class rasp", "an old boxer's walk" — never a number and never boy / girl / young / teen.

Eye life

Dead eyes are the number-one tell of AI-generated acting. Every character gets continuous, naturalistic ocular life, in the profile and in every scene.

• Micro-saccades and gaze targeting on whatever they attend to; the gaze keeps moving — eyes drift, flick away in thought, scan to a detail and settle back. They never lock frozen.
• Realistic blink rate and quality, tied to state: rapid blink-bursts under stress; slow calm lids in control; a blink-and-glaze on a moment of dissociation.
• Live catchlights — the eyes must read as wet, lit, and alive.
• Controlled stillness is chosen, never dead. For a near-unblinking predator calm, keep blinks rare, slow, and deliberate — a decision, not a freeze — and let the gaze still shift slowly with intent.
• Eyes lead the thought. The eyes reach the target a touch before the head turns. The thought is readable in the eyes before the words come.
• Eye life reacts to the beat. Blink rate, gaze steadiness, and catchlight warmth all shift when the beat shifts.

The phased-blink shorthand from the film pipeline — one lazy blink → a quick DOUBLE-BLINK → one HARD reset-blink — is the cheapest way to buy a living face in a static shot (../higgsfield-seedance/HELL-GRIND.md § Physics, not adjectives).

Scene adaptation

The master profile is who the character IS. For each scene, rewrite it into the moment — never paste it.

1. Present characters only. An acting paragraph only for characters actually in the shot. No character in frame → no paragraph.
2. Keep the constant core. Identity, vocal profile, signature tics, eye life, and the emotional through-line stay the same in every scene — this is what holds the character together across cuts. Never contradict the master.
3. Re-express for this scene. Select, emphasize, modify, or drop specific behaviors to fit the scene's posture (seated / standing / running / hiding), action, beat, emotional state, and time of day.
4. Transform, don't delete. A behavior that physically cannot happen here is converted, not removed: a restless pacer slumped on a sofa keeps the same nervous engine, displaced into restless micro-sway, wrist-flicks, and paper-tearing. The energy is constant; its outlet changes.
5. One flowing paragraph. Fold the adaptation into prose in the character's register — no bullet lists, no headers, no "dial" lines inside the prompt.
6. Lead with the character's reference tag so the model binds the acting to the right person (../higgsfield-seedance/SKILL.md § Tag naming).

Voice — fixed identity, never adapted

Acting is rewritten per scene; voice is locked. Each character gets one Voice prompt — a permanent vocal identity pasted verbatim into the audio field every time they speak, and never modified. If the character appears but says nothing, omit it.

"A [origin / accent descriptor]. [Timbre and register]; [pace and delivery manner];
[emotional character — and how it shifts under pressure]."

The vocal profile inside the acting paragraph describes how speech behaves dramatically (tempo shifts, breaking registers, whispers); the Voice prompt in the audio field locks the sound itself. Both must agree.

Seedance holds only three or four voices per character within one tonality, so drift is real — stress-test the voice across generations exactly like the look, and lock it harder rather than "keep shooting" (../higgsfield-seedance/HELL-GRIND.md § The voice is not an asset).

States, not transitions

Video generation models fail transitions and nail states. Describe characters already IN the action state — mid-throw, mid-punch, mid-pace, mid-argument — not the process of getting there.

• ❌ "reaches into the bag, pulls out the knife, winds up" → collapses
• ✅ "mid-throw, arm extended" → lands

Chain states beat by beat instead of narrating continuous processes. The production form of this rule: complex action opens the prompt, and the approach becomes a separate shot (../higgsfield-seedance/HELL-GRIND.md § Solutions born under deadline).

Ensemble and space

• Group reactions travel in a wave, never in sync. One person gets the joke first, the second half a beat later, the third not at all. Simultaneous identical reactions read as fake — unless a deliberately choreographed comic sync is the point.
• The reaction is worth more than the action. After every event, the most valuable frame is the face of the person who saw it.
• Freeze at the threat. Constant ensemble micro-movement — shifting weight, gesturing, leaning — and at the key threat everything STOPS. The contrast of bustle → stillness is punctuation.
• Movement equals motivation. Nobody crosses a room without an impulse: toward something or away from something. Strong motivated events — closing in (escalation) · turning one's back (dismissal, or hiding the face) · standing while the other sits (dominance grab) · sitting down mid-conflict (paradoxical power) · stopping in the doorway (the threshold is the decision point) · starting to pack (ultimatum by body).
• The strong are still and quiet; the weak fidget and shout. Danger is played not by the dangerous one but by the tension of everyone around them. Threat without wind-up: no menacing pauses, no slow-motion turns — in a truthful world violence arrives without an announcement.
• Degradation accumulates. If a character is worn down across a story, carry it in the body cumulatively — greyer, heavier, slower reactions — never resetting between scenes.

Engine ceiling: only ≤3 characters track reliably across cuts (../higgsfield-seedance/ENGINE-RULES.md rule 5). Write the wave for the tracked pair or trio; everyone else is crowd, described as a mass.

Part III — Quality control

The atlas of bad acting

Recognize the symptom, apply the prompt-level fix.

The performance scale

A self-check on the paragraph before it ships.

• 0 — Mannequin. Text delivered, behavior absent.
• 1 — Declaimer. "Expressive" text, indicated emotions, illustrating body.
• 2 — Diligent. An objective can be guessed, but one tactic, late reactions, empty pauses.
• 3 — Craftsman. Objective and beats present, listens to the partner, body makes sense. Missing: subtext, surprising tactics, inertia of states.
• 4 — Alive. Continuous behavior, contrasting tactics, subtext diverging from text, status in the body, reactions ahead of lines, at least one unexpected-but-true choice.
• 5 — Magnet. All of 4 plus paradox. The two-truths rule: at level 5 the character always plays TWO truths simultaneously — helps and hates it; apologizes and defends; loves and has already left. One clean emotion without contradiction reads as synthetic on a close-up.

Aim every hero shot at 4+. A paragraph that self-checks at 2 or below gets rewritten before it ships.

Pre-send checklist

• Objective as a verb aimed at a partner — for every character in frame
• Obstacle and stakes exist; the cost of failure is real
• 2–4 beat changes, each visible in behavior (pause / posture / tempo / gaze)
• Reactions begin before the partner's lines end; assessment moments present
• Every character has business; the interrupted-action accent used deliberately
• Distances change, the changes are motivated, and they are written in metres
• Status is in the body, not just the words
• All tics carry triggers; the mask has its crack ("However, when X…")
• Eye life written explicitly: saccades, blink quality, catchlights, eyes-lead-thought
• Voice prompt pasted verbatim if the character speaks; omitted if silent
• States, not transitions
• No wardrobe, camera, or color inside the acting paragraph
• No age words anywhere (engine rule 1)
• Ensemble reactions staggered; strong = still, weak = fidgety
• Scale check: would this paragraph score 4+?

Part IV — Worked example

Invented character; use as a pattern, not as content.

Master profile

Character acting as VIKTOR. A retired night-shift taxi driver and former amateur boxer; heavy,
thick-necked build gone soft at the middle, with a flat-nosed face and old scar tissue over
both eyebrows; sits and stands with a low, grounded center of gravity, weight always on the
whole foot. Runs on a single engine: decades of waiting — for fares, for rounds, for trouble —
have made patience his weapon. Vocal profile: low, hoarse, unhurried baritone with a
working-class rasp, short sentences delivered flat and economical, dropping to a slower,
quieter register the more serious things get — he never speeds up. Key physical habits and
tics: rolls an old coin across his knuckles when sizing a situation up; a slow, audible
nose-breath before he says no; when lying is happening in front of him, he goes completely
still and lets a long silence do the pressing; his default face is a heavy-lidded, bored mask
that conceals total attention. Eye life: sleepy, hooded eyes with slow deliberate blinks and
constant quiet scanning — mirrors, hands, exits — the gaze settling on a speaker a beat before
his head turns; catchlights low but alive. Walking style: a heavy, rolling "old boxer's walk",
short economical steps, shoulders level, hands loose and ready, never hurrying. However, when
someone raises a hand near him, the sleepy mask vanishes in a half-second: the chin drops, the
hands rise halfway, the feet find their old stance — then he catches himself and folds it away,
embarrassed. His face only truly softens for stray dogs, which he feeds from his coat pocket.

Voice (pasted verbatim when VIKTOR speaks):

"A working-class city accent, roughened by decades of night shifts. Low, hoarse, unhurried
baritone; short flat economical sentences with long comfortable pauses; calm and faintly
amused, going quieter — never louder — as things get serious."

Scene adaptation

Scene: VIKTOR sits in his parked cab at night; a nervous passenger in the back seat is lying about having money for the fare.

VIKTOR sits motionless in the driver's seat, heavy and grounded, watching the passenger in the
rear-view mirror instead of turning around — his hooded eyes flick between the mirror, the
passenger's hands, and the door lock in slow, quiet scans, blinks rare and deliberate, the gaze
settling on the mirror a beat before his head ever moves. The old coin walks across his
knuckles on the seat-rest, unhurried; as the passenger's story falls apart, the coin stops
mid-roll — he lets the silence sit, takes one slow, audible breath through the nose, and
answers in his low, hoarse baritone, flatter and quieter than before, never speeding up. Only
when the passenger's voice cracks does the sleepy mask ease a fraction: a long exhale, a slow
blink, the coin resuming its roll — patience choosing, for now, to be kind.

What happened here: the walk is irrelevant (seated) so its energy moved into stillness and the coin; the signature tics kept their triggers (coin = sizing up · stopped coin = interrupted action as punctuation · nose-breath = refusal · stillness plus silence = pressure on a liar); the eye life obeys the master but is re-targeted to mirror, hands, lock; the beat changes are visible (coin stops → silence → quieter voice → softening); and the voice stayed untouched — it will be pasted verbatim into the audio field.

Final axioms

1. Acting is behavior under pressure, not a demonstration of feelings.
2. Listening matters more than speaking; reacting matters more than declaiming.
3. Emotion is the consequence of a won or lost struggle, and it is expensive.
4. The body is smarter than the words: when text and body conflict, the viewer believes the body.
5. The strong are still and quiet; the weak fuss and shout. Exceptions are events.
6. Every tic needs a trigger; every mask needs a crack.
7. Every scene is somebody's defeat. If nobody lost, there was no scene.
8. Subtext is not shown — it fails to be hidden.
9. States, not transitions; the model films what is, not what becomes.
10. When in doubt — cut. Less acting equals more truth.

Related Skills

• ../higgsfield-seedance/SKILL.md — the Seedance prompt this paragraph goes into
• ../higgsfield-seedance/HELL-GRIND.md — the CHARACTER ACTING block's production form, dialogue construction, and the micro-life rules
• ../higgsfield-seedance-2-5/SKILL.md — 2.5's observable-cue emotional direction
• ../higgsfield-facs/SKILL.md — muscle-level facial control by Action Unit code
• ../higgsfield-soul/SKILL.md — identity consistency and micro-expression vocabulary
• ../higgsfield-character-design/SKILL.md — the story bible upstream of any profile
• ../higgsfield-audio/SKILL.md — where the locked voice prompt is delivered