Showcase Your Work With an Effective Animation Reel
See if this already happened to you: you’re looking for a new job or talking with someone about your Animation and Motion Graphics work and what happens most of the time? They ask you if you have a Reel. If it’s the first time you hear about it, it can be a little awkward don’t knowing what it is. If you know what a Reel is and somehow you don’t have one, people can judge you and maybe not take you too seriously. But why it happens? Why people tend to ask Motion Designers to see their Reel?
Why it’s important
The Animation Reel, Demo Reel, or just Reel, serves as a way to showcase your animation work in a fast and effective way. Your work will be condensed in it and if done well it has the power to grab the viewer’s attention, making them to search more about your work. The Reel serves as a way to present your abilities in your field. No matter if it’s animation, motion graphics, vfx, color correction etc — it’s an opportunity to show what you live for. Instead of watching dozens of videos in your Vimeo, for example, people will look first for your Reel, to analyze the quality of your work and see if they will be interested in more.
We live in a fast world and people don’t want to lose time watching bad content. Specially if it’s a company or studio looking to hire someone, they will first jump to your Reel to see if they can allow themselves to ”waist time”, taking a second and longer look at the rest of your work.
Your Animation Reel serves like a Business Card for the Animation Field.
One Minute is enough
The same principle applied to most of the Explainer Videos, work for an Animation Reel. Do your best to get your Reel around 1 minute of duration. As people don’t like to watch long videos, the same applies to a reels.
You shouldn’t insert all the videos you already made together and build a feature film. It doesn’t matter if you made your Reel for a specific job interview or just to show your work, people will prefer small videos and one minute is more than enough to act like a preview of your work.
Define the Structure
Like every animation project, a Reel has it own steps and structure to make it effective. There are different ways to create your Reel but we, in general, can divide it in four main components:
- Your Work
- Intro
- Outro
- Music
Your Work
There’s no doubt about the content that goes here. It’s the work you want to show and it’ll fill 90% of your Reel. It’s the selection of your best videos presented in a edited version to show your abilities and the variety of projects you’ve worked on.
Intro & Outro
They appear in different moments of the Reel, but we can talk about them together. The Intro and the Outro is where you add more value to your Reel. It’s an opportunity to mix your best skills and develop something that people never saw before in your work.
For example, if you’re an Animator and have some skills in 3D and Frame by Frame animation, but never had the opportunity to mix them before in a project, your Reel is a good place for your to do that.
The Intro is the first thing people will see. In general it presents your logo or your name but you don’t need to make it simple. Use the creativity freedom you have to develop something you really want to. It’s a great opportunity to play with your brand and with your storytelling skills.
The Outro is the ending part, it helps to reinforce the brand/person behind the video and is your last chance to give a good impression. Creating something that can keep the interest of the viewer is the key here. It can also be used as a credit, specially when you collaborate with a Musician or Sound Designer for your Reel.
Intro and Outro are your opportunity to add more value to your Reel. Take your time and create something unique here.
Music
It’s very sad how some people don’t give the desired credit to music. A good music makes the whole difference in a Reel just like it do in all animation. Music determines the pace, transitions and the tone you want for you Reel. It helps you to set the feeling you want to communicate to your audience. I suggest to always start with a music and build your Reel around it. When you have a video/animation well aligned to the music, everything flows smoothly, and the viewer experience is enhanced.
Your best work and nothing more
Don’t try to add all the work you’ve done, instead choose only the best ones. Sticking to a 1-minute length video is also a great way to make you choose only your best work. With a shorter time, you won’t be able to present everything you did and will need to make a curation of your own work.
Your best work is not the one you were paid more or that have more views. It’s the work you did with passion and soul, and that represents the work you want to keep doing.
Take a look at the variety of projects you did. How many scenes of them are remarkable and easily associated to your work. Look for projects where you express the best of what you can do. Choose a few project and extract the most you can out of them.
Enjoy the Process
The creation of a Reel need to be something joyful. Take the desired time to evaluate your own projects and to create a great concept for your Intro & Outro.
You don’t need a definitive Reel. There are different types of Reels. Some people like to create Reels according to seasons or once every year. Others, like to use different Reels to present different set of skills.
Below we share MOWE’s 2015 Animation Reel we did in the beginning of the year. You can take a look and see everything we talked about Structure, Work Selection, Duration and how everything works together.
A Reel is a continuous process and it evolves together with you.
Originally published at mowestudio.com on November 25, 2015.
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