A showreel is a collection of videos, of projects and creations a person has made, that can be shown to a future employer. A showreel is made to present all your work, and prove your experience and skills in an engaging way.
There are important aspects of a showreel; like keeping it under 60 seconds, including your best work at the start and end, and picking music first, so you can edit to the beat of the song. There are also wrong ways to present your showreel, like not including your contact details, going over 60 seconds, or including work in progress work that doesn’t support a finished project.
To start, I wanted to research other artists’ showreels and learn from how these people present themselves. It was nice to see these artists’ work and their unique ways to showcase them.
I started with this Animation demo reel by Michelle Cheng (Lemoncholy). What I love about their showreel the most is their opening animation. It is composed nicely in the frame, while clearly showing their name and contact details. I love the detail that the door opening represents the opening to their showreel. I love the projects they have included too. The first and last clips are definitely stronger, but the clips in-between also show their workflow, and their animation skills clearly. Lastly, I do enjoy the more calming music of choice, it suits the visuals of the work, and represents itself well.
Next was a 2D showreel by Ella Moffatt. I love how they show a wide range of 2D animation mediums such as typography, traditional pen on paper, and digital animation on a range of software like Toon Boom, Clip studio and Adobe Animate. This shows how experienced their skills in 2D Animation are. I also like how they labelled each clip with what medium they used, and when it was created e.g. ‘Clip studio paint, 2020’ It gives a clear indication of how long they have been creating such projects, and again the range of knowledge in mediums they use. However, I think they could have included an opening to their reel, and added some contact details so clients know where to find them.
Lastly I found this 2D Animation showreel by Henry He. They have a great opening animation, showcasing their contact details, and even their portfolio website. Henry’s work greatly presents the principles of animation, such as squash and stretch, secondary action, and anticipation. It shows they have great understanding of the principles, and has lots of experience. I also like how they included audio from the actual clips along with the background music. It makes the showreel more engaging and might encourage you to go find and watch the whole project. However, for Henry’s projects and visuals, I feel like a more upbeat background song would fit in better to the showreel.
With this information I started to gather all the clips of animation that I have, and compile them into an After Effects file. Before I went into clipping each video, I went to find a suitable background song.
I made a playlist on YouTube of the songs that I found. I made sure I was looking at copyright free songs while searching. I collected a few but picked out one I liked the most.
I chose the song below called Better Days. It is more chill than upbeat, but has a good sequence of beats.
Clips:
First of all, I dragged in the song I picked out. I listened to the whole song and cropped it to a suitable time limit of 1 minute. I listened to the song through After Effects, and when I head a beat coming, I pressed CTRL + 8 to place down a marker on the timeline. This marker will help me indicate where all the beats are, so I can adjust my clips to the in-between parts, and it will eventually sync well to the song.
Here I placed in all my animation clips, and adjusted their length to the best scene. I brought all my clips into a pre-composition to keep them altogether. Once I cropped all my clips, I assorted them to the markers on the main composition and they synced well.
In addition, I added text for each clip to label their name, and what medium it is. This allows for easy understanding and ability to recognise my projects by their name. Again I made a pre-composition for all the text layers to keep them all together. I wrote down the names of each clip, and aligned them to where they are positioned in the clip composition.
Seeing both the clip and the text together worked very well, and placing them all on the left corner fit well for the whole sequence. For just one clip, I had to make the colour of the text to black, as the clips background was in white.
Next, I adjusted the music a little more since now I know from my clips roughly how long the reel will be. I made keyframes to adjust the audio levels so the music will fade in and fade out of the showreel.
Opening:
For the opening, I wanted an engaging typography animation to attract the audience in the first seconds of my showreel. I took inspiration from Sorcha’s typography lesson, and this tutorial below, to help me make a nice introduction to my showreel.
I added a coloured background, my name and my contact details aligned in the middle of the scene. I chose a bold font for my name, and the same font as the caption texts, to make the reel consistent.
I followed the tutorial which included key framing the position, offset and ease high settings within After Effects animate option.
Below is how the typography animation turned out. I think its a nice touch to the showreel, and its an addition to my ability to 2D animate by adding this feature.
Ending:
For the end clip I reused the same background, title and caption as the opening scene. This is useful to remind the viewer of who the person is and is easier/faster access to their contact details if needed. I brought them over to the end of the timeline, but took out the animations from the opening, and made it a little simpler.
I started with each of the text with low opacity, then set higher opacity keyframe further In the timeline. I also adjusted the offset setting so that the text would come in from the left in a horizontal path. This made for a simpler transition and makes it easier to read after.
Below is the animation typography for the ending clip. I think it wraps up the showreel well, and clearly shows the information needed.
I went through a few versions of the showreel, as there was a lot to fix up, and changes to be made.
In my first version, It was still quite rough. There were still a few clips to add at this point, and more accurate positioning of the clips was needed too. I didn’t get as far as the ending sequence here, and the opening was a lot longer than the final version. However, I did have a good, concrete layout of how I wanted each clip to go to the beat.
In my second version, I had made a lot more adjustments to make sure everything played smoothly. I added another clip to the reel, and made the ending sequence at this point. This was a lot better in terms of the editing, but more could be done.
I took a tutorial with my tutor Alec and he gave me some feedback on the showreel clip above. He was happy with how everything was flowing, but suggested I should switch up my clips to make sure I had a strong clip first. I did notice that the first audiovisual clip did not have much movements or animation skills that I could have presented first. Rather my clip of the Cyberpunk world had a better presentation of my 2D animation skills considering the walk cycle in it. I moved it first, moved another audiovisual clip upwards, and pushed back the first audiovisual clip to the middle of the reel. I made a few more adjustments to the length of the music as my tutor suggested the opening was just a little bit long. I made sure it fit well and still had a few seconds to read the text.
After that, my final version was complete. I am happy with the outcome! I appreciate finally having a showreel to show off my work with and it was a fun process to make. If I were to make this showreel next time I would have liked to make a strictly 2D based reel. At this moment I don’t have as much projects to show. But later on, when I start some animation project ideas I have, and complete some university assignments, I will have much more to showcase.
I have also created a Vimeo account to post my videos on. My showreel can be found there too.