Your Credits Laid Out as a Career at a Glance
Timeline is a new way to display your credits: everything you have done, in date order, across every medium, on one continuous line rather than in separate blocks.
It tells a different story
A grouped credits list answers "what have you done in television". A timeline answers "what has your career been", which is a question people ask more often than they admit.
Laid out chronologically, patterns appear that the grouped view hides. A run of theater that turns into screen work. A gap that closes with training. Steady work in one genre widening into two. Those are the shapes that make a career look like a career instead of a pile of jobs.
Who this suits
Actors with five or more years of work and a mixed background across mediums. It is genuinely good for stage actors moving into screen, because the theater work is the foundation and the timeline shows it as such rather than filing it in a box lower down the page.
It suits early-career actors less well. Four credits on a timeline looks sparse in a way that four credits in a list does not. If you are two years in, use the grouped view.
Handling the gaps
Everybody has them and the timeline shows them, which is the honest objection to this view. Two things help.
First, include the things you did not think of as credits. Training intensives, a self-produced short, a workshop production, a national tour of something unglamorous. Those are on your training page and they can appear here.
Second, remember who is reading. Anybody in the industry reading your timeline has had the same gaps, and 2020 in particular needs no explanation. A gap reads as a problem mainly to the person it belongs to.
Switching between views
Timeline is a display option on your credits page, not a separate page or a separate set of records. It reads the same credits described in the credits rebuild, respects genre labels, and switching back to the grouped view is one setting. Nothing is duplicated and nothing needs re-entering.
Our older piece on career timelines makes the case for the format itself.
Create your free actor website and try both views on your own credits.
