The character profile
One page holding everything about a character — their image, their general look per department, the scenes they play, their looks, and the props, wardrobe, vehicles and animals that belong to them.
Open a character and you get the page every department ends up living on. It is the place where "what does she look like in this scene, and what is she carrying" has a single answer.
The ⋮ menu next to the character's name is the same one as on its card in the list: edit, photo, merge, export, delete, mark as wrapped, and change type. Changes made from it show on the page straight away.
The image, and the one that builds itself
A character can carry a photo — the casting shot, or whatever best identifies them at a glance. Upload it, replace it whenever, remove it when it is out of date.
Remove it and something useful happens: the card falls back to a quick image assembled from the continuity photos already attached to that character across scenes. A character with photos in two scenes shows two thumbnails. So even before anyone uploads a portrait, the card is not empty — it shows the work the production has actually done.
A background character or a double with no photo of its own, and a principal with no photo and no gender set, shows the icon of its type instead of a stock picture — a star for a principal, two figures for a double, a group for background — on its card and page, in search, in the character pickers, and on the character chips and small stacked avatars of a scene card.
The image also doubles as the way through the cast. The neighbouring characters sit either side of it, in the list's own order: click one to go there, swipe the row on a tablet, or press ← and →. Going through thirty characters filling in a missing detail is a page you never have to leave.
The general look
Each department — hair, makeup, costume — has a General Look on the character, edited from the button of that name on the department's card. It is the character's baseline: what they normally look like, before any particular scene is considered.
It holds photographs, a description for the standing truth about them — Jeannine has brown hair, Elizabeth always has a mole — and a choice of which photograph represents them for that department. That description is what shows on the department card, so the card reads as a summary of the character rather than an empty shelf.
There are two places a department's information can live, and choosing the right one is what stops it being repeated or lost:
| What it is | Holds | |
|---|---|---|
| General look | The baseline appearance | Photos, a description, a main image |
| Look | One specific appearance, in specific scenes | Photos, typed details, wardrobe, continuity scenes |
A general look is what they normally look like, belonging to no particular scene. A look is a change from that baseline, attached to the scenes it covers.
The general look is the one people miss, and the symptom is a look named something like "normal" attached to most of the script. See building looks.
How far through this character is
The profile header carries a filming progress bar over that character's own scenes — the share of them marked fully filmed. It answers the question a production office asks about a performer rather than about the shoot: how much of her is left?
It counts what shot out counts, so the two never disagree: omitted scenes are in neither, and partly filmed scenes count as outstanding. When it would reach 100% the bar gives way to the Shot out badge, which says the same thing better.
On a season, the character's Episodes section carries the same bar per episode — over that character's scenes in that episode only. That is how you see she is finished in 103 while 104 has barely started, which a single figure across the season hides.
Scenes
The profile lists the scenes the character plays in, taken from the screenplay. You can add a scene the parser missed and remove ones it got wrong, which is often needed after a revision or on a character created by hand.
This list is what everything else narrows against: a look can only cover scenes the character is in, and a prop created here can only be attached to those scenes.
Everything that belongs to them
The profile has a section per department and per asset type:
- Looks — hair, makeup and costume, each with their own list
- Wardrobe — the pieces this character wears, including any shared with another character
- Props, vehicles and animals — items belonging to this character rather than the production
- Episodes, script days and shooting days — where they fall in the schedule
Assets created from these sections belong to the character, which changes their behaviour: they are only offered that character's scenes, and they attach to the character within a scene rather than to the scene itself. See tracking props for what that distinction means in practice.
Doubles and relationships
Two sections at the foot of the profile link characters to each other.
Doubles lists the stunt, photo, body and hand doubles and stand-ins who perform this character, grouped by kind with any specialty beside them, with Add double to create one already linked. On a double's own profile the same section is Double for: the characters it performs. Each chip opens the other page, so a double and its principal are always one tap apart.
Manage on a double's Double for adds another character it performs, with its kind, or removes one. A double has to perform at least one character, so the last link cannot be removed — change the character's type instead if it is no longer a double.
Relationships are the story: who is whose mother, boss or friend. The type field suggests the usual ones — mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, wife, husband, partner, friend, boss, employee and more — and you can type any other. A link reads correctly from both sides: set Mark as Sherry's son, and Mark's profile shows Sherry as his mother. The word on the other side follows that character's gender, so with no gender set it reads "parent", and it updates as soon as the gender is filled in. Types typed by hand, which SceneMatch has no reverse for, show on the other side with a back-arrow instead.
Doubles stay out of relationships. A double has no relationships of its own and is not offered as a character to link to, and stunt performer, body double and stand-in are no longer offered as relationship types — they are the Doubles section above.
On a returning series: the predecessor link
A character in a season can be linked to the same character in the previous season of the same series. When a new season imports a screenplay it can match characters against the previous season and create those links for you; you can also link or unlink one by hand from the profile, and the profile will suggest a predecessor when it thinks it has found one.
The link is what makes continuity carry forward — most usefully, it lets the character's wardrobe be imported wholesale from last season rather than rebuilt. See tracking wardrobe.
Per-character exports
Most of these sections export on their own — the character's looks in one department, their wardrobe, their props. This is what you hand to a department for one actor rather than for the whole production.
The thing that is not obvious
Continuity photos live on the character inside a scene, not on the character. Open a scene, open the character in it, and that is where the photo and note for that moment belong — see scene continuity.
The profile aggregates them, which is why the quick image works. But if you are trying to record what someone looked like on a particular day, you want the scene, not this page. The profile answers "who is this person"; the scene answers "what were they like right here".