A showreel is a compilation of your best work, it should last around 1 minute long as employers won’t have time to watch longer so it is important to be thoughtful with the organisation of the content within the video. This is a short showcase of your technical skills, creativity, and style to future employers and clients, and should highlight your best work, quality over quantity is important (it doesn’t have to be finished but should should be high quality), and your best work should be first and should be impactful so that even if people don’t watch all the way through they can still know you are skilled (starting and ending strong is important to be memorable). It is also good to show versatility here, with a range of styles, techniques and mediums to show your range as an artist.
A portfolio is broader showcase of your work, it should still display your best work but can show off concept work, 3d models renders and more. Since I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to focus on in the realm of animation my portfolio is going to be most useful to showcase my variety of skills and techniques. This document should be kept up to date and presented in a logical way so that the relevant sections can be accessed by future employers.
I went and looked at some inspiration for showreel Title Card design and editing style, to see how they used music, what content they showed off, etc.
I really liked this Showreel, it uses a nice simple title card that has all the necessary contact links for employers to see. It has a nice balance of finished and rough work with fluid editing between these, where they have listed the software used and what they worked on for that particular shot. It uses non-invasive music that works
I also liked the consistent branding and colour schemes that tie in with their portfolio website. I like how this portfolio is organised, as my own work covers a wide variety through 2D and 3D, splitting up work into projects and outlining what they created for that with stills and gifs/videos as well as organising elements into more linear understanding of animation, drawings etc means that employers can look at what area you have applied for and not have to explore lots of unwanted content.
This video game animation reel uses more dynamic music and editing to showcase a variety of complex movements and simpler character acting. This brings a lot of personality and shows attention to detail by showing multiple angles of the animated work, although it runs on a bit and has a very simple title card, letting the work speak for itself.
I was also able to talk with a Character Design artist who works in the Industry who gave me some advice on how to develop that style of portfolio and the body of work that professionals wanted to see from this. This is an area that I am interested in but I don’t have the work to tailor a portfolio for this at this point. Simona’s Portfolio is really well organised and consistent, showing clear shape design, colour and exploration of expression and solid drawing, and only showing off High Quality work for her direct line of work.
Admittedly, I am not the most confident in my work. I think a lot of my work is pretty rough and not too high quality so I went and tried to pick out what I could from previous assignments and make notes of how I could improve in the future.
I picked a song that was copyright free, and one that was a bit cheery but not too intrusive to my animations. I chose my music from here: https://uppbeat.io/browse/music/lo-fi-beats.
Then this was my first pass of my animation Showreel, I found that there wasn’t a lot of 3D work included here, so I will be adding in some of my work from the game’s project to adjust this.
I then got some feedback from Henry who recommended that I could pick more dynamic moments in my music to match actions in my animation, as well as including some of my modelling skills including stills and breakdowns of my models, and turnarounds. With this I changed my animation Showreel to a Demo Reel.
I went an replicated the UDIM layout presentation and then edited this in Premiere Pro to have a wipe affect, and also re-rendered my character creation model turnaround in Unreal for a better result.
I also changed my music to be a bit more Dynamic and synced up the changes in music to changes in work/mood. With that I rearranged some of my work and then this was my final demo reel, I think it shows off a good range of my 2D and 3D work and starts strong and ends on a nice defining moment (as the characters leave so does my showreel end). I made a note to work on the animations in this over summer to add some colour to them to make them more finalised.
Portfolio
I found this professional on Youtube who went over some of the dos and don’ts for portfolios, including some website design. Again these largely fit within the character design scope but are still applicable to my own work. I really like how her website was set up, but I preferred the collection layout of Ella’s website so I will be doing a combination of these when creating my own layout.
I went ahead and used Wix to set up a portfolio website as it gave me a bit more customisation than Art Station does. I made sure to highlight my profile and my show reel so that you are greeted with my work as soon as you land on my site.
