For the second part of our part of our major project we were directed to create a CV and showreel. For students this a requirement to step into the industry, thankfully I didn’t have that same issue but it was a nice chance for me to punch up my old CV and showreel.

CV

My old CV was very basic, having previously overdesigned a CV while I was in my undergraduate I had sought to keep my working CV basic and easy to update with new work experience.

It’s not really an attractive CV by any regards. It’s a very basic design and kinda ugly, so I was keen to have another go at it but one thing that I wanted to maintain was that employer’s had found the layout easy to read and navigate.

When it came to gather reference for redesigning I was lucky enough to have a slew of examples from our previous students to start with. I had a clear idea in my head what kind of style I wanted, something that looked professtional, wasn’t overly cutesy or cartoony and had a general mininalist approach.

I liked these examples by previous students but was aware that they getting a little incestuous with their design motifs so I wanted to explore further and avoid making mine too similar.

The main take away I got from these examples was petite type size, bold headers with clear sections. a white background with black type and a splash of colour for personality.

I really liked the yellow colour off the examples I had found and was keen to move on from the bland cyan I had been using before. Yellow is apparently the first colour the human eye sees and I felt it had a lively energy to it, which matched my personality.

I sketched out a rough layout in Photoshop before I starting.I made sure to leave an even spacing around the border and broke up each section into it’s own respectable area. From here it was just a straight forward but time consuming process of finding a typeface I could work with. Thankfully Henry reconmended I check out the fonts from Adobe’s own database, which made things a look more faster. I decided to settle on Rig Sans by Jamie Clarke since it had that professtional vibe I sought but also had a large selection of different font styles I could work with, which was useful for breaking up sections.

With my font chosen and my layout down I started work on my first pass.

I was really happy with how quickly it came together and pretty pleased with the inital result. I was unsure about including a photo my myself, there’s always so much differenting opinion on whether or not you should include a photo but I felt it humanises the CV more to me. I showed it to Henry and Sarah and got this feedback:

• Make the background an off white/grey rather than a straight white.
• Align the text to centre.
• Remove the yellow lines behind the about me section.
• Rearrange my refence section to they were spaced more vertical.

With that done, this was my final version:

I’m really pleased with how this turned out in the end. It looked a lot better than my previous CV and had all the design motifs I was going for, minimalist, professtional, easy to read/navigate and with just the right splash of personality to avoid it being boring.

SHOWREEL

My next assignment was to create a showreel. At the time I didn’t realise I could have done an optional portfolio, but since I already have an online portfolio, (here) I figured an showreel would allow me stretch my video editing skills and give me something different to work with, plus I haven’t updated my personal showreel in over 10 years.

I’ve done several showreels for student year groups throughout my time at Ulster so it wasn’t really too difficult to repeat the process myself but I decided to have a look at a few showreels from studios I liked and some random artists I found.

A lot of the showreels I looked at had very chill music tracks to them, but with very noticable beats to them. This matched the advice we would give our students and which I’d been given myself, pick a track with a beat and edit your cuts to it.
I wanted a track which could build to a crescendo and had a reasonably fast beat since it would allow me enough oppitunity to fit enough cuts in.

After many, many, many hours of searching through royalty free tracks on YouTube I finally found one I liked.

I also wanted to make sure I book ended my showreel with my name and contact info and tied the style of the title cards back into my CV, to make it a more cohesive branding. I had originally wanted to put an animated paper texture behind my title card but Henry talked me out of it since it wouldn’t have matched my CV. My showreel was a combination of backgrounds, prop design and animation I’d done between my MA and my time in the industry. When I showed my original version to Sarah, she simply reconmended that I add text to explain which parts of my showreel I had actually worked on since it was so eclectic.

I was pretty happy with my final version of my showreel. I think having more shots of my backgrounds in the actual animations makes it more interesting to watch, at least from a showreel perspective. I think the energy of the showreel works well and I feel I’ve edited the footage nicely to the beats of the music, especially matching the frantic footage with more intense beats. Overall, I’m pleased with both results, I think my new CV is a vast improvement over the old and my new showreel is well edited and enaging to watch.