Your Halloween Photo on VHS Tape

{ "identity": "if a photo is uploaded, the person stays the person in the photo: keep the shape of the face, the skin tone, the shape of the nose and the mouth, the hair type and colour, the apparent age, and the freckles, the glasses and the beard if there are any. The VHS degrades the IMAGE, never the person: the static and the smeared colour run over the face without changing a single feature. Do not make them younger, do not slim the face and do not smooth the skin. With no photo uploaded, create a 100% fictional person with no resemblance to anyone real", "subject": "a man of about 30, fair skin with freckles on the nose and the cheeks, short wavy red hair slicked back with gel and one strand falling on the forehead, a short, sparse red beard, light eyebrows, a slightly awkward closed-lip smile and the head tilted a little, like someone caught off guard by the camcorder, looking straight into the lens", "wardrobe": "a HOMEMADE vampire costume: a shiny black satin cape with a tall stiff collar and the red lining showing, tied at the neck with a black cord; an ordinary white dress shirt, a little creased and untucked; black trousers; no fangs, no makeup, no blood and no brand, label or lettering of any kind", "action": "standing on the porch, facing the camera, holding in the right hand, at waist height, an orange plastic candy bucket shaped like a pumpkin with a cut-out face, full of colourful wrapped candies; the other arm hanging loose at the side, under the cape", "scene": "Halloween night, 1994, the wooden porch of a suburban house: on the left, the screen door ajar with warm yellow light coming from the hallway and a fake cotton spider web stretched across the doorframe and the white column; on the steps and the porch floor, three carved pumpkins lit from inside, with triangle-eyed faces; on the right, the white wooden railing and dark shrubs; in the background, the wet street in a light mist, an orange sodium streetlight, dark trees and a distant house with a lit window", "composition": "vertical image in a 3:4 ratio, the person slightly right of centre, framed from the shins up: the bottom edge cuts across the shins, with the feet OUT of the frame; the top of the hair at about 10% of the height, the face taking up about 18% of the frame width, the pumpkins in the bottom left corner and the street with the streetlight in the upper right third", "camera": "a handheld home camcorder, at chest height, head-on, about two metres from the person, a slightly wide-angle lens, everything in the same soft focus with no deliberate background blur", "lighting": "the camcorder's own lamp, hard and frontal, blowing out the skin and the white shirt a little and throwing a shadow behind the person; the orange glow of the candles inside the pumpkins; yellow light from the door on the left; the sodium streetlight far behind; the rest falls into darkness, with no fill light", "color_palette": "orange of the pumpkins and the bucket, black of the cape, red of the lining, blown-out white of the shirt and yellow of the door, with the blacks washed out into a bluish grey and every colour faded and pulling towards magenta", "style": "photorealistic, a paused frame from a VHS tape recorded at home in the 90s, the feel of a family video that turned slightly creepy over time, nothing like a professional horror film", "vhs_artifacts": "the degradation is what the whole image has to show: low, soft resolution; the colour bleeds to the right along the red and orange edges; thin horizontal scan lines across the whole frame; colourful chroma noise in the dark areas; a tracking noise band with horizontal white and coloured streaks that starts at 90% of the height and fills only the bottom 10% of the frame, running over the legs and the floor and never coming anywhere near the face; a slight wobble along the vertical edges of the columns and the door; a thin dark border at the sides, like at the end of the video line", "materials": "satin with a hard reflection of the lamp, shiny orange plastic of the bucket, worn painted wood of the porch, stretched cotton of the fake web, pumpkin skin with the light leaking through the cuts", "details": "the face is the most legible part of the image, despite the static; the person's shadow shows behind them, on the wall, because of the camcorder light; the pumpkin faces glow and smear a little to the right; the candies in the bucket read as small coloured dots with no legible wrappers", "negative_prompt": "modern sharpness, high definition, current smartphone photo, portrait background blur, noise band across the face, face unrecognisable under the static, a different person from the photo, slimmed face, plastic skin, fangs, blood, monster makeup, date, time, REC or any on-screen text, letters, numbers, watermark, logos or real brands, horror movie character, famous movie mask, deformed hands, extra fingers, AI artifacts" }