The Demo Reel

The Demo Reel

For animators, compositors, effects artists, or anyone creating moving 3D images, the demo reel exceeds the resume in importance. Unless you’ve worked at a top shop with an Eminently droppable name such as Digital Domain, Weta, or ILM, no one really cares where you’ve worked as much as they do about what you did there. What they want to see is your reel.

If you’re still not clear on what a demo reel is, it’s a VHS video tape—or in Growing cases, a DVD—or an online facsimile of one, containing samples of your very best work, most of which is at least minimally animated. It can include shots you created for films, commercials, or video; movies or screen captures of video games; or even simple turntable animations of models and environments you created. Typically, a demo reel will the demo .

The Demo Reel, Portfolio, and Resume
have a short title screen and maybe closing credits at the end, but you should waste no time jumping right into your work. Music and other forms of audio are entirely optional . Because so many supervisors and recruiters have very specific opinions about what should and shouldn’t be on a reel, we’ll let them do most of the talking here.
First, there is the animator’s reel. More than other artists, the animator needs a reel that communicates as a single work of art, rather than a series of unrelated moving images. The best animation reels are short films, where the character being animated tells a story and moves through a range of emotions.
Impressed by good visual storytelling than by an elaborate command of computer graphics. “There are great storytellers, and there are great stories, and you don’t always get the two of them together. So what you are looking for is somebody who has got technique in the service of ideas.”
The thing that jumps out of certain portfolios is, here is a communicator who’s go ideas he or she wants to communicate and has mastered a technique that allows them to be expressed, and we see those three elements present. A communicator, ideas, and technique, all coming together—you know you’ve got somebody who’s thinking about the same thing you are, which is how to delight an audience, how to scare an audience, how to put an audience on its edge and release that expectation with a laugh. That is always what we are looking for. So that may mean that the tape is very rough. It could contain no computer graphics whatsoever. That’s a really important thing for people to
understand. From our point of view, we care about the ability to express ideas, not
whether you use a computer to do it

DEMO REEL MUSIC
Picking out just the right music to accentuate your demo reel can be a difficult decision. Music often drastically affects how someone views imagery. The beats and timing of the music can help or hinder the timing of the animation and edits in the video.

You should choose a piece of music that best reflects your imagery, something that is upbeat and keeps a good pace with your work. If your best work is in subtle character work, Then hard-driving techno music is probably not your best choice.

However, keep in mind it’s not necessary to include music on your reel. In some cases, v supervisors will turn off the sound altogether when they sit down to watch reels. They prefer to focus on the timing of the imagery entirely.

Irfan Sayani