How to use Elements — reusable places, objects and styles

By your third render of the same diner you will have described it three different ways, and the diner will look like three different diners. That is the whole problem Elements solve. An Element is a place, an object or a style that you describe once, save, and then mention by name in any prompt afterward — and the description and reference photos come along every time.

Characters cover people. Elements cover everything else.

What an Element is

Three kinds, one mechanism:

• Places — a location. A diner, a rooftop, a specific stretch of coastline, a bedroom with a particular window.
• Objects — a thing. A product, a prop, a vehicle, the object the whole film is about.
• Styles — a look you want to reuse that is not covered by the director's rack. A grading treatment, an illustration style, a specific film stock feel.

Each one holds a name, a written description and reference photos. In a prompt, the description is folded in as text and the photos are passed to the engine as references, which is why a saved Element is more reliable than retyping the same sentence — you are giving the model two channels of the same instruction instead of one.

Elements live on the Elements page in the studio, and you can hold up to 50 of them. They work in the video studio and the image studio alike.

Write descriptions a generator can use

This is where Elements are won or lost. "A cozy diner" is not a description, it is a vibe. The model will invent a different cozy diner every time and you will have gained nothing.

Describe what a location scout would photograph. Countable things, materials, light sources, wear:

A narrow 1970s American diner with eleven red vinyl booths along a window wall, cracked black and white checkerboard floor, a chrome pie case at the register, fluorescent tubes in a dropped ceiling, one neon OPEN sign in the window, permanently overcast daylight outside.

Three rules that keep descriptions useful:

1. Nouns and materials over adjectives. "Chrome pie case" survives a render. "Charming" does not.
2. Name the light. Fluorescent overhead, window light, one practical lamp — light is most of what makes two shots feel like the same room.
3. Describe what is always true, never what is happening. An Element is a set, not a scene. Do not write the weather, the action or the person in it; those belong in the prompt.

Add reference photos if you have them — a still you already generated and liked is a perfectly good reference, and it pins the look far harder than words. If the place does not exist yet, generate it as an image first, then save the good frame as the Element's reference. What the engine does with those photos is covered in the reference image entry.

Mention them in a prompt

Type @ in the composer and pick from the list. The Element's name goes into the prompt as a token and its full recipe travels with the render.

A complete prompt using a saved place and a saved character together:

@Mara sits alone in the third booth of @HaleStreetDiner stirring a coffee she has not touched, slow push-in from a wide shot to a medium, hard fluorescent overhead light with cold daylight from the window on her left, rain starting outside, resigned and patient mood.

Forty-five words, and two of them are carrying a paragraph each. The prompt stays readable — which matters, because a prompt you can read is a prompt you can debug — and the diner is the same diner it was yesterday.

Characters join a prompt the same way, by @mention; build them at the characters page. The division of labor is simple: cast for people, Elements for places, objects and styles.

Putting a product in an ad

This is the one that pays for itself. In the Ads Studio, your product is an Element: an object with a good description and, crucially, a real photo of the actual thing, filed under the brand it belongs to.

The workflow:

1. Create the brand. Paste its website and Clap, eroq's agent, reads it in about a minute, fills the brand kit and offers the products it finds. Each one you keep is saved as an object Element with its photo, in the brand's folder on the Elements page. In the brand's Products tab, "Add product" brings in one the site does not show, physical or virtual (an app, a course, a subscription, shown on a phone or laptop screen), from its page link or photos, and "Read a page" reads any page of the site again and lists its products to add in one go.
2. Check each product's description. It should name the material, color, shape, finish and any text on it, because engines read it to draw the product right.
3. Open Create. Image ads makes a batch for the products you tick, each ad on its own selling angle with a headline, a primary text and a call to action; Video ads takes one product, one of eight formats (a UGC testimonial among them), a presenter and a spoken line, and writes the prompt around the product for you.
4. Tick where it is going: for image ads, the places they run (the feeds, Stories & Reels, TikTok, Pinterest and more), and each ad renders once per size they need; for a video ad, the place it runs, which sets the clip's frame.
5. Render, then download each picture at the exact size of its place (places and sizes). For more versions of a video that works, the Multiplier tab (Ad Multiplier) turns it into 3, 6, 9 or 12 variants, each with a new character, outfit, location or product.

Because the product's photo rides along as a reference on the engines that read pictures, the bottle in the ad is your bottle rather than a plausible-looking bottle. That is the difference between a mood piece and something a client will sign off on. The AI ad generator page covers the Ads Studio side, and UGC ads walks the full production loop.

Holding a set across a film

In Cinema, each scene carries its own action and its own @mentions — which means Elements are how you keep six scenes in one world without retyping the world six times.

A practical setup for a short film:

• One place Element per recurring location. Mention it in every scene set there.
• One object Element for anything the plot hinges on, so the briefcase in scene two is the briefcase in scene five.
• One style Element if you have a look the director's rack in Cinema's Look panel does not quite express. The rack handles film type, era, tempo, gear, lens, aperture, palette and lighting; a style Element handles the rest.
• Characters as cast, per scene, so the faces travel.

The rack sets the grammar of the film, Elements set the nouns. Together they are most of what people mean by "it looks consistent."

Housekeeping

Fifty Elements is a lot until it is not. Some habits that keep the library usable:

• Name them so you can find them at @. HaleStreetDiner beats diner2, and it beats the diner from the noir thing even harder.
• One Element per real thing. Two entries for the same location will drift apart, and you will mention the wrong one at midnight.
• Prune per project. When a project ships, delete the single-use props. Keep the places and the styles.
• Reuse across projects. A good style Element is a house look, and house looks are worth more the second time you use them. The same is true for product Elements across product videos and campaigns.

FAQ

How many Elements can I save?

Up to 50 places, objects and styles per account. Characters are managed separately as your cast and do not count against that number.

Do Elements cost credits?

No. Creating and storing Elements is free — you pay for the renders that use them, at the normal per-model price.

Can I use an Element in both images and video?

Yes. Elements join a prompt by their @Name in the image studio, the video studio and every scene of a Cinema film. In the Ads Studio, a brand's products are object Elements filed under it, and its static and video ads pick them from there.

Describe the world once, then get on with the film. Open the video studio — new accounts start with 40 free credits.