A Chapter Names a Production, and the Panel Under the Player Fills Itself In
An interactive reel is a reel cut into chapters, so somebody watching can jump to the scene they care about instead of sitting through four minutes to reach it. The part that makes it worth doing is the panel under the player: as each chapter plays, it shows the production that chapter came from, with its poster, its company and its year.
That only happens when the chapter is attached to a credit. Until it is, a chapter is a label and nothing else, and the panel stays empty.
Doing the attaching for you
Chapters get typed as plain film names, because that is what they are. So each chapter title is now looked up against IMDb's own public search endpoint, which returns the title's identifier, its year and its poster in a single call.
Matching is the entire difficulty, and it is worth being specific about why. "Emma" is several different films. So is "The Island". Taking the first result would attach the wrong one, confidently, with a poster that looks completely convincing.
So candidates are scored rather than taken in order, and the strongest signal by a distance is whether you appear in the cast summary for that title. A film with your name in the cast is almost certainly the one your reel is showing. A film without it, however well the title matches, probably is not.
It skips rather than guesses
Below a confidence threshold the chapter is left alone. No credit is attached, the panel stays empty for that chapter, and you can link it by hand.
That threshold is also what stops a chapter called "Outro and Awards" from becoming a credit for a film called Outro. Anything that reads like a section heading rather than a production fails to score and is skipped, which is the correct outcome.
Two smaller things. Posters are copied into our own image cloud on the way in rather than hotlinked, which is the same policy as everything else on the platform and the reason your posters keep working when somebody else's server changes. And the lookup can be re-run safely: a credit that already exists is reused rather than duplicated, and chapters you have linked yourself are not touched.
The honest caveat
This works in proportion to how well documented your work is. A studio feature resolves immediately. A student short with no IMDb page, a corporate video, or a piece of theater will not resolve at all, and no amount of scoring changes that. Those chapters stay as labels, which is what they were before.
It also depends on your own IMDb cast listings being right. If you are uncredited on a title, the strongest matching signal is missing for it.
Related
The reel format itself is covered in interactive reels, and what belongs in a reel at all in the showreel guide and creating a standout acting reel. Credits on your site are organized in the credits and filmography rework.
Wherever the reel ends up, it belongs near the top: put your reel front and center. Create a free actor website.
