A video style (we also call it a treatment) is a complete creative format: the structure, pacing, visual look, voice persona, and music profile of a kind of video. Wavemaker ships a large catalog — browse it at Video Styles.
What a style controls
Each style bundles:
- Creative identity — what the format is: a UGC-style ad, a cinematic trailer, a news recap, a cooking video, a real-estate listing tour.
- Format defaults — aspect ratio, target duration range, cut rhythm (fast/measured/slow), and edit style.
- Look — a locked visual medium (photoreal, cinematic, 2D/3D animated, illustrated…) and often a signature grade and lighting language, reinforced by curated style reference frames during generation.
- Sound — narrator persona and music profile defaults.
- Review calibration — stylized formats are judged on their own intent (a glitchy hype video isn’t penalized for being glitchy).
Auto-selection vs. explicit picks
If you don’t pick a style, the planner selects the best fit from your brief — a “recipe video for my food blog” routes to the cooking format automatically. The selection respects your chosen canvas: if you fixed 16:9, a vertical-native style won’t hijack the format.
If you explicitly pick a style — a style card in the composer, a style link, or the skillType option in the API — the choice is locked. The style’s look is enforced harder: its defined medium, rhythm, and edit style become binding, and its curated style plates are injected into every image generation so the look holds frame-to-frame.
A useful rule: browse and pick when the format matters to you (“I want it to feel like a movie trailer”); let auto-selection work when the content is what matters.
Styles vs. your own look
Your prompt can always shape the look inside a style (“moody, desaturated, handheld”). If your explicit direction contradicts a style’s default, your words win where they’re explicit — e.g., a “live-action” instruction dominates a normally-animated subject.
Special styles worth knowing
- Recreate a reference ad — pair with a reference URL; the analyzed ad’s length, rhythm, and structure bind the plan (structure only — never its footage or copy).
- Photo-grounded formats (e.g. real-estate listing) — build the video entirely from real photos (your listing’s actual rooms), never AI-invented imagery. These require an explicit pick; they’re never auto-selected.
- Catalog Video templates — reusable, data-bound versions of a style for product catalogs. See Templates & slots.