Coming from Simian: showreels, spots, and who watched

What maps to what if you run your reels on Simian: how showreels, branded presentations, and watch analytics are shaped on this side.

Simian and HoldFast overlap on the thing production companies and post houses care about: getting a reel in front of the right person, and knowing what happened next. Simian is alive and actively developed, so this is a translation guide for people comparing, not an obituary. Here is what maps to what.

Showreels become reels

In Simian you build showreels out of spots. In HoldFast you build reels out of assets: pick the videos from your projects, set the order, choose a cover, and publish to a page with its own address. The page is the deliverable, and the address is what you send. See How to make a showreel.

Reels are built from the same library your team already works in, so a spot you cut this morning is available to a reel this afternoon without a second upload.

Custom branded presentations become brand kits

Rather than styling each presentation, you build a brand kit once: logo, colours, fonts, favicon, and a link back to your site. Every reel and presentation you publish wears it. A second kit covers a sub-brand, or a white-label pitch where your own identity should stay out of the frame. See Brand a reel.

Reel-Time Analytics becomes Insights

Simian's analytics tell you the reel was watched. HoldFast's view analytics do that and then work on the harder question of who. Each view is resolved as far as the evidence honestly allows: the company where the evidence supports it, the named person when they arrived through a personalized link, and an engagement score built from watch time and repeat visits.

The wording is deliberately careful. An unverified company reads as a possible visitor rather than a confirmed one, because a guess dressed up as a fact is worse than no answer at all. See How to see who watched your video and Engagement scoring explained.

Personalized links are the sharpest tool here: send a per-recipient address and the views on it carry a name instead of an inference. See Personalized links for sales outreach.

The review side comes with it

The difference most people notice is what happens after the pitch lands. The library that feeds your reels also feeds review links: timecoded comments, drawing on the frame, per-version approvals, and no account for the reviewer. Presentation and post-production review sit in one place instead of two systems holding two copies of the same master. See Review links, reels, and presentations: which one to use.

Trying it side by side

You do not have to decide in the abstract:

1. Start a free workspace and upload the six or eight spots your current reel is built from.
2. Build one reel and put your brand kit on it.
3. Send it to a real prospect, alongside whatever you would normally send.
4. Compare the analytics against what you get today, on the same pitch, in the same week.

One real send tells you more than a feature grid. If the reel earns its place, move the rest of the library across. If it does not, you have spent an afternoon.