CV
In preparation for creating my first professional CV, I scheduled a careers consultation appointment to assist me in organising my thoughts and deciding what should go on my CV and how to lay it out, as I felt I had nothing to put in my CV, but this appointment was extremely beneficial and made me realise I did, in fact, have a lot to put in.
From this, I took the advice we received in ‘Week 4’s’ presentation about making a CV and eventually came up with my first draft, which I sent to Rachel and received feedback on.
After taking on Rachel’s feedback, I played with colour more and went with a more purple palette so that way it didn’t look as disjointed and was easier on the eyes.
This was my second attempt at the CV and I still just wasn’t satisfied with it. Although I had a lot to talk about, I knew I just wasn’t talking about it in a way that was professional and painting a positive picture of myself, so I asked my sister for some help, and she gave me a few notes about how to write about my work experience and improve my formatting.
I took on my sister’s advice of listing my British Film Industry courses as work experiences and going more into depth about what exactly I did during them. she also suggested having my role as course representative as work experience instead of in what used to be awards/positions.
A couple of things I changed after going back to researching were fixing silly mistakes I made, like putting my work experience in chronological order. I also decided to list the software I have experience in and rate myself in it out of 5, as it was something I noticed other people in class doing and I thought it was a great idea so I stole it.
I also changed the picture to be happier because the more I looked at the icon image, i began to think that the nervous-looking icon wasn’t putting across a very good first impression of me so I think that change was definitely better.
Cover Email
I had never heard of a cover email until this assignment; I had always assumed that you would just send a cover letter but after researching more about it, I learnt that a cover email is essentially just a way to hook in the hiring manager to read your CV.
After this I wanted to know, what makes a good cover email?
Include your cover letter in the body of the email.
- It is allowed to transfer your cover letter into the email body if the hiring party directly requests it or if they make no mention of it. It allows hiring managers to quickly review your cover letter without needing to open or download any more materials, saving everybody time.
- Make sure to sign off on any professional or business-related emails. This is a standard professionalism that shows respect for the recipient while also making it easy for the employer to reach you directly. This may contain your full name and phone number.
I also looked at Indeed’s website to see an example of a cover email and decided to use their template, as I can often struggle with formatting.
Then for the company I wanted to apply for, I decided to go for a junior storyboard artist at Lighthouse studios in Kilkenny; the animation they produce inspires me and is the type of animation I see myself working in 5 or 10 years into the future. An example of their work would be mo Rick and Morty and Pog Mo Pigeon, with Rick and Morty being a beloved adult animated show and Pog Mo Pigeon, an in-house produced Irish short about a young boy called mickey growing up in the catholic church in the 70s. Pog Mo Pigeon especially inspires me, as I would love to work on projects that bring Irish culture to the forefront of cinema for a more adult audience.
Since I want my cover email to be as accurate as possible, I decided to dig around and find out who the hiring manager at Lighthouse is, but I couldn’t find one on their company website, so I checked Linkedin next, but I had no luck, so I decided to address it to the HR manager, as at my current job I was hired by HR.
Showreel
After our week 4 talk, I felt really inspired to start researching how to best put together a showreel and started looking at advice and also showreels that I found inspiring.
This video helped a tonne when I was starting to comb through my own animations and was deciding whether or not to include them in my showreel and I had a few key takeaways from the video:
- Short & sweet: keep it 30 to 60 seconds of my best work to date; anything that isn’t good should be cut, and only put in the work I want to attract.
- Structure is key: start and end strong, don’t start with a bad impression and don’t leave with one either.
- Music is a big factor; choose something which shows off your personality, ideally copyright-free, and avoid clichés and long intros.
- Treat it like it’s for a client.
So after this, I’ve gathered a few showreels I find really inspiring. While my work isn’t on this level, I hope to be at this standard one day.
These two stood out to me the most; however, one thing I noticed was that a few showreels feature an animated version of the creator in the intro, which I plan to do a similar thing for mine.
I came up with this; I think something like this would be really cool to put as the intro to my showreel However, I think I could definitely do something better but considering the amount of time I have left, I want to make sure I at least have a rough showreel I can use as a base to make better during my gap year.
I was also having a rough time deciding what music to use; a few videos mentioned using old anthems of extinct sovereign states or really old classical music, which doesn’t have any copyright but I want a very upbeat track so I’m unsure what kind of music to go with.
I came up with this on my showreel. I’m not particularly proud of it but I think for me going forward, it will be a good blueprint for my gap year for a rough showreel idea. I like the way some artists structure their showreel with an intro, lipsync, miscellaneous animations, then a lipsync to end off, which I think is a really nice layout that flows easily.
Right now I’m not overly happy with my showreel or the work that I have done but I’m hoping that during my gap year I will refine these animations and build up a better understanding of anatomy and form, which I’m hoping will help improve my consistency in my animations, as a big flaw of mine is that I struggle to maintain consistent form in my animations and I think it really negatively impacts my work so I hope to improve on this in the coming year.