Characters

Characters are first-class citizens in Popcorn. A character can be a host, a narrator, an interview subject, an animated cast member, or just a recurring presence in your videos. Once you’ve made a good character, you can @-mention them in any future movie and Popp will use them.

What a character holds

Every character has four properties:

Property	What it captures
Role	What they do — “barista host”, “marketing strategist”, “news presenter”
Appearance	How they look — clothes, age, build, distinguishing features
Voice	The voice the agent uses for them (assigned, designed, or cloned — see Voices)
Personality	How they speak and behave — “dry, sceptical, witty”

Plus optional knowledge links — URLs or documents the character “knows about”, which Popp will use as context when writing dialogue or scripts.

Creating a character

The easiest way: open the sidebar, click + next to Characters. Popcorn opens an element chat for the new character. The right-hand panel shows the live preview — image, properties, knowledge.

Tell Popp what you want:

Create a 28-year-old female marketing strategist. Confident, with sharp wit. Smart-casual style — blazers, jeans. Brunette, glasses. Calm voice, mid-pitch. She knows our brand and our product.

Popp will:

1. Generate a hero image based on your description.
2. Fill in the properties as you describe them.
3. Suggest a voice from the library (or you can pick one).
4. Save the character to your library.

You can iterate the same way you do on a movie:

• “Make her a bit older, maybe 35.”
• “Change the outfit to a black turtleneck.”
• “Try a slightly deeper voice.”
• “Generate three more reference shots from different angles.”

Editing properties directly

The right-hand panel shows each property as an editable field. Click any property and you can edit the value directly — Popp will save the change immediately.

This is useful when you want to make a precise update without going through chat (e.g. swapping a voice, fixing a typo in the role).

Adding knowledge

In the Knowledge tab on the right panel, you can add:

• URLs — pages the character should “know about” (your brand site, a Wikipedia article, a launch announcement).
• Documents — PDFs, brief docs, brand guidelines.

Popp uses these as context when writing dialogue or scripts that involve this character. A character who “knows your brand” writes much better ad copy.

Generating a HeyGen avatar

For a talking-head presenter use case, you can wire a character up with a HeyGen avatar. In the character chat, just ask:

Generate a HeyGen avatar for this character based on the hero image and current character description.

Popp will produce the avatar and connect it to the character. From then on, any movie that uses this character as a talking head will lip-sync the HeyGen avatar to the narration.

Reusing a character

Once a character exists in your library, @-mention them in any movie chat:

• “Use @Luna as the host.”
• “Cast @Milo as the customer in this scene.”
• “Run @Luna through the same script in vertical format.”

Popp uses the character’s appearance, voice, and personality as the source of truth.

Characters in the sidebar

Your characters live in the sidebar under Characters, with thumbnails. The library supports search (Cmd-K), favourites, and quick navigation.

Trending characters created by the community show up on the community library. You can browse them for inspiration.