I will start by saying that there are a few threads on various forums, so feel free to check them out, but this post is a distillation of those threads and personal experience. I will also keep this reasonably general, as obviously different reels will focus on different things. These are the basics that I believe you should cover.
Actually, this is a resume not a demo reel. D'oh!
I remember reading a couple of long threads about what you shouldn’t have on your reel. To my mind, if you didn’t put on everything that someone mentioned, you wouldn’t have a bloody reel! For example, it is routinely stated that you shouldn’t do light saber battles. Fair call. Fair call, that is, unless you do something like Ryan vs Dorkman, which is a pretty damn cool low budget saber battle. Same thing for spaceships: “Don’t put spaceships on your reel unless they are better than ILM’s work”. O RLY? Are you not supposed to put anything on your reel that is not up to the standard of the worlds best VFX studios? Well that’s great advice if you work at ILM and have a team of people to make your shots look amazing, but it’s not really that helpful if you are starting out and need to show your hard-surface modeling chops.
Also, I will categorically state that my current reel is in no way perfect. Reels should always be looked at with an eye to revise and cull, but they do take a bit of effort to organise, so you don’t want to be fiddling every week on the bloomin’ thing.
The Creative
Don’t put anything on your reel that you feel is not top quality. If you don’t think it was good work, why would anyone else? The reason for this is that even if you have something good, if you have something bad next to it, it will actually negate or bring down the impact of the good work. This is a big one with student reels, and I am still a little guilty of it. You want to pad out that reel and show off all you have learned, but I guarantee you that you have some real crap there. Come on, admit it. It’s time to be honest 
Following on from that, HR and lead artists would rather see a reel with one amazing 10 second shot than a sub-par 5 minute reel. Actually, any 5 minute reel will probably get dumped on general principles.
Speaking of time, show your stuff quickly. I have watched demo reels where it takes, honest to God, 30-40 seconds to show work after all the fancy mo-graf intros and fade in and outs. Such reels would be instantly binned. A few seconds for you contact details and the straight into it!
Focus. If you are an animator, don’t feel the need to do an amazing lighting/texturing setup . Seriously, you could have just the rig and it would be fine. They will be looking at your animation. Ugly texturing and lighting take away the focus from what you are trying to show. Same with modeling, show your models and meshes. If you are a great texture artist as well, great, but don’t feel the need to pretty it up if that is not what you do. It’s like the suggestion of not showing bad work next to good. If you have a mega cool mesh and it is textured with a couple of bad procedural textures it is going to look terrible.
If you do specialise in several areas, consider have separate reels for separate job applications. Of course, if you are a generalist it is a different story.
Keep it to around 2 minutes. Mine is a little long (I feel) at around 2:20, so some more cutting might be in order. No one wants to watch a 5 minute reel. This means no short films. Most studios have a backlog of reels and want to get to the good stuff fast. Investing 5 minutes to find out where the story is going is not your passport to success.
The Technical
The main focus with the technical side of things is to ensure that your reel and details are seen with the least amount of effort or problems. If someone has to scratch around to find your contact details or, heaven forbid, install software to watch your reel, you are going to be binned faster than Superman folding washing on laundry day!
Quicktime. That’s it. Don’t faff about with crazy codecs. You can’t be sure that studios will have DivX orXVid on their computers. Almost all facilities will have Quicktime on their computers. H264 is pretty popular these days and gives excellent files sizes although it seems to gamma up the video a bit.
PAL or NTSC. Unfortunately some places still want actual DVD reels, which is frankly a pain in the arse. Granted they are easier to watch as you just take it into a meeting room and slap it in the DVD player to watch, but the quality is very average and you have to faff about with postage, which if you live in Australia, starts to get expensive (errr, because we are very far away from everybody). Soooo, set up two reels and save the projects so you can quickly burn a PAL or NTSC DVD. Unfortunately a bid hard to test them if you don’t have the other format DVD player, but oh well. Also, keep in mind that you can create DVD’s with data folders, so I use that to put a very high quality Quicktime and PDF copies of my documents with a note on the DVD menu to check the disc on a computer if HR wants to see better quality copies.
PDF or plain text. Don’t send your resume and breakdowns as Word files. Firstly, you can’t be sure the people receiving it will have Word, secondly Word files are often treated as suspicious virus carriers by IT. Pretty much every computer will have Acrobat Reader or failing that, Notepad.
Music: Up to you really. In my experience most reels are watched with the sound off. Obviously if you are an animator and showing some lip-sync work, sound will be needed. Perhaps note this in the intro to your reel so those watching will know to have the volume up. As for synching all your reel to beats in your music, well, it takes an awful lot of effort for not much result.
Put your contact details everywhere: This is a major bugbear of HR people. Put your name and contact details on your resume, put them on the physical DVD, put them on your reel at the start and end. And, for the love of God, name your files something useful. The number of online reels I have scene name “reel.mov” or something similar is astounding. Name it something like “your_name_animation_reel_0904.mov”. If someone sees it, they know exactly what the file relates to.
Tags: Industry, Ramblings, Tips & Tricks
Extremely helpful and in-depth mate, I cant thank you enough. Sorry I left my reply late, been fairly tied up at the moment.
I also appreciate the email you sent very much. Out of everything I have read and been told, this has been probably the most concise look at the basics for getting your reel sorted. As someone putting together a demo reel now, It has really helped me to refine what work I am putting together.
Your reel looks very nice, those Australia clips are very swish!
Thanks again
Cool, I just added a couple more bits that I forgot about in the initial post. Hopefully it helps people as I know that in my course, and many others, there was a heavy focus on producing a demo reel in the last 6mths of work, but not much info on how to do it. It was more a case of “throw everything on there.” Sure recipe for disaster!
One thing I have always been interested in is the process of obtaining the footage for your reel. For instance the shots of Australia that you worked on.. what type of issues do you have with obtaining the footage with rights and such? And is it as simple as saving your work to your own personal storage device once you have completed the shots?
Weeeeell, that can be a prickly subject. I would highly, highly, super highly recommend not saving work to your own drives at work. In fact, I would highly recommend not attaching any drives whatsoever to a work computer. Studios take this kind of thing very seriously and taking work without permission is treated quite harshly. Usually the studio you work with will receive permission to give artists some work to use on their reels. It really depends on each situation whether you get final shots or access to elements to show breakdowns.
On the other hand, on Australia we were denied the use of any artist breakdown material. I have no problem admitting I ripped sections of the DVD to show my work. If Baz Luhrmann or any of his production company have an issue with that, I am happy to talk about it. In my opinion, when artists have spent 4 months of their lives working to fulfill your vision, the least you can do is let them show their work so they can try and get more employment. You would think this would be obvious, especially for Australian artists working on the movie ‘Australia’! Denying artists that right is a big “F*CK YOU!” Sorry, but more than a few people were burned by that.
wow that really is a slap in the face. There’s no ‘fair go’ in that.
Yarp, none too happy about it. C’est la vie.
Hey Matt, when your rotoing.. i noticed in your reel that to demonstrate the matte you have the light colours on the footage (such as pink and green). I was just wondering when you roto do you constantly have those colours there? or do you stick with just the keyframe outlines.. im just finding that shakes outlines are damn near impossible to customize and feel that after effects is much more usable when it comes to masking.. It might just be me but im finding it hard to understand the best way to set up a roto for when working on a production.
Good question and not an immediately obvious answer, although the principle is similar in Shake and After Effects. Firstly I actually set up my default colours to be different in Shake in a preferences text file. This way my roto splines were red and the handles were blue, making them much easier to see. I also changed the colours of all my layer nodes so that when I am zoomed out I can instantly tell what is going on (eg SwitchMatte=blue, Inside=yellow, Outside=orange etc).
As for the colour overlays, how I do it in Shake is to have the plate I am roto-ing with two Add nodes underneath it, both with my roto masking into the side of both of them. The first Add has no changes, so it just the rotoshape over the tape, the second Add has some colour change, eg, 0.2,0,0.2. This way I can have the first Add (no colour) in the A buffer and the second Add (with colour overlay) in the B buffer and I can switch between them.
I believe they way most people do it in AE is to make a solid at the top of your layer stack set to Add/Screen and then to make your mask on that, giving the same result as above.
I haven’t used Silhouette but I think you can assign different colours for different rotoshape overlays (eg you can have an arm, leg, body rotoshape and you can just assign colours to them).
Great answer mate cheers. Yeah I was definately thinking to myself that it seems so easy to make a solid in After Effects compared to realising the same method in Shake.. The way you have explained to do it in Shake is another one of those times when you think wow about Node based compositing. Thanks.
Well, you could do exactly the same thing in Shake, make a solid colour, mask it and then use an Add layer node to put it over your plate. It’s just easier to mask an Add colour correct node