DEMOREEL 101

The single most important purpose of your demoreel is to market you and your skills through showcasing your work. So the worst thing it can do is to bore people, witch is very easily achieved by having it run for too long. Quality over quantity is the name of the game. You will be judged by the weakest shots in the reel, therefore make sure to only include your best work. It’s very easy to diminish a great impression with just 1 mediocre shot. Be your own worst critic and cut it down rigorously.

A common strategy is to start with you strongest shot (to grab the viewer’s attention right away) and finish with your 2nd best. Try to keep it entertaining and at a reasonably fast pace. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a 2 minute run time (or less if you are early in your career). If you lose people’s attention, they are more likely to turn your demo off before even seeing everything you wanted to show. Better wow them with just a couple epic shots in 90 seconds and leave them with only two options: hit replay, or get in touch with you for more.

Most of the work in our industry is made by teams of specialists that fill a very precise role in the pipeline. Since you probably made the demo to fill one of those roles: focus on showing the relevant skills necessary for the particular area you are trying to get into. That means: don’t apply for a compositing job by showing your modelling prowess, or an animation position with a reel demonstrating your abilities in shader writing. It’s awesome that you have those skills, but they are not at the core for the job at hand and therefore merely a bonus.

See this fact as an advantage: you don’t have to worry about other tasks and can concentrate on whats really important. Coming back to our animation reel example: a well made walk-cycle is showcased equally good, if not better, when presented on a gray-shaded turntable versus one with suboptimal lighting or overwhelming FX simulations.

If you want to show off different skill-sets: you can of course consider making a generalist reel covering various disciplines. But keep in mind that specialized positions outweigh generalist jobs by far, especially in larger companies. There is nothing wrong with having multiple reels for exactly this reason.

By now it should be no secret that making movies is a huge team effort. It’s not rare that single shots or assets get shared between multiple artists for a variety of reasons. Be it the increasing complexity vs. shrinking production schedules, load balancing, or simply people getting sick and their work has to be picked up and continued. There is nothing wrong with showing work that was not entirely done by you. It even shows off the fact that you are a good team player. But it’s also the reason why it’s important to clearly state your contribution.

The common way is to include a short text with each shot, often at the bottom of frame, outlining what you did. If something is unclear, people will pause, so don’t worry about the time it takes to read it on shorter shots. Just makes sure it’s easy to read. The hard part here is to strike a balance between being too generic (aka the frequent ‘everything’ description) and overly detailed (redundant explanation of workflows or tasks).

We all know that a demo witch is perfectly timed to a song is great fun to watch. But as long as you are not in music / sound / motion-design (if you are, you can skip this rule entirely), it’s not the part that gets you the job. It is most likely that people, who are in charge of evaluating your demo, have the music turned off anyway. Either they want to discuss it’s contents with you or others, are sorting through a large amount of demos while listening to their own music, or it’s a conference where it’s too loud to begin with.

This is not saying that you should not have music at all. It helps a lot with the flow, mood and overall entertainment factors, but that’s mostly for people watching it out of curiosity or purely for fun. So please focus on what is important. Furthermore keep in mind that music is highly subjective. Choose something that is likely not to freak people out. Also remember to credit the song at the end.

You are making your demo so people can see it, right? To make that as straightforward as possible for you and the viewers: simply have it available online. Once required by a lot of companies, the days of physical demo-reel copies are long gone. The preferred method now is to supply an easily shareable link to an online viewer (please don’t link directly to a file or download).  Most commonly used in the industry are Vimeo.com and YouTube.com, which are simple to use and essentially free. (Other platforms and hosting it yourself are of course valid solutions as well – just make sure it’s easily playable in a browser across all operating systems.)

To be even more prepared it’s a good idea to also have your demo offline and with you on your phone, tablet or device of choice. Who knows who you bump into? Especially if you are attending a conference, don’t expect spare laptops to be available just to showcase your work.

This is obvious and should be needless to say, but: don’t present other people’s work as your own! Simply only show shots you directly contributed to and state what you did. Stolen and mislabeled work will be found and it puts an immediate end to your career.

There is one exception though (most applicable to animation reels): continuity. If you want to show how well your work flows with the surrounding shots, it’s ok to include some overlap. This should be kept to a minimum and must be stated very clearly. Most commonly these shots are desaturated and include an info text.

Being prepared is never a bad thing. If the perfect opportunity comes along and you don’t have to scramble to quickly update your 5 year old demo – even better! Your demoreel should always represent your current skills, yourself and where you are in your career. Keeping it reasonably up to date is definitely recommended. Obviously this gets a lot more important when you are looking for a job (which, due to the element of uncertainty in our industry, could come unexpected.)

It’s a good habit to request and store your demoreel material as soon as it becomes available and use the downtime between big projects (or between jobs at the very latest) to update you’re reel. A freshly updated demo is also great justification to contact the recruiter of your favorite company to check out your newest work.

This can’t be stressed enough. As discussed under point #01: really try to make it as short and to the point as possible. A short run time combined with quality shots is the best way to provoke a replay, which is essentially what you want: get people interested and come back to you for more. Consider it your personal teaser trailer.

Have very similar shots? Cut all except one. Are you padding the reel to fit the song? Don’t. Have a long shot that’s only interesting at the end? Trim it. Got a long intro? Shave a few seconds off. Included a black dramatic pause in the middle? Hell no! You get the idea.