The Tips in detail

 "How to make my demo-reel?"

If you are going to advertise yourself to possible clients it is a matter of "must" being able to show to them what you can do. This is usually done by handing them a portion of your work, a so called demo-reel. What I'm going to tell here mostly adresses to high-end reels and you should be aware that producing such a gimick might become costly. Before you start doing such a reel you should make up your mind about how much money you are able to invest into this.

Your reel should consist of work you are intending to do for your clients-to-come. For example, if you are heading to become a modeller, you should show your best models, prefereably animated and together with short fly-arounds. Show your models in mesh-mode (wireframe) and fully textured and lightened. In any case you should have a (navigatable) slideshow of your 10 best images and some of your best anims.

Since fly-arounds and slideshows are "usual stuff", you will have to make them special. Be creative here. For example you might morph your models from mesh-mode to texturized, animate them and then morph over to the next model. You should show that you can animate a model, prefereably together with secondary animation. Be as creative as possible here and include all important techniques you know.

Reels are usually skimmed by the dozen an hour by the employer. Keep this in mind. For this reason the taped reel is by far the most common form of a reel. Many studios only accept taped reels, but you should always ask on advance what &qout;they" want to have.

Wether you do your reel printed or on a digital media or on a videotape is up to you but on the other hand largely depends on what the company you address wants to have.

If you are going to make your reel on your own, make sure that you know how to use that authoring-software needed to produce one. It might be possible to do your printed stuff in Microsoft Word, but since you are going to have this printed professionally, you should use software designed for layout-purposes, like Freehand (Macromedia) or Pagemaker (Adobe) or QuarkXpress. If you don't have these products and / or lack the skills needed to make proper use of it, go and let this be done by somebody who does know. In this case you want to contact a professional layout- or publishingstudio for this task.

If you have the skills and the software for making up your printed work, do yourself a favour and use proper equipment to get this printed. Todays inkjet-printers can produce quite good-looking results, but if you compare these to professionally printed stuff you will for sure notice significant differences. I consider using a laserprinter or a thermo-transfer printer being much better than using an inkbased machine, although I'm aware that most of us won't have a colorcapable laserprinter at home.

Another point is that you need proper knowledge about color-separation-tables and color-calibration and how to apply this. If you don't know about these terms, you might wonder why your artwork looks differently on screen compared to your printed results. If you can't fix this on your own and simply don't have a clue about what this color-separation or calibration is, go to some publishing studio and let them do the work.

In the case you are going to make a reel on a digital media (ie. a CD), make sure it is as much platform independent as possible. This is especially true for the codecs and fileformats you might want to use for your anims and stills. At least you should include software that for sure enables others viewing your stuff on most popular systems like Windows (9X and NT) and Macintosh and perhaps even Linux. Caution here! Have a close look at the terms of copyright for any software you include within your reel!

Perhaps you want to try your digital reel in HTML-format or as an Acrobat-pdf, because this works almost everywhere and decoding software is availible for almost every system. Which format to use for your images and anims is up to you and a matter of the authoring-software you are using, but you should use common fileformats as for instance self-contained Quicktime-movies (Apple) for your anims and tiff- or tga-format for the high resolution stills. Formats like jpg and gif for instance do a lossy compression that sometimes dramatically affects the quality of your images, especially when printed.

Organize your files on the media in a way that other people can easily browse through it. Store your included viewers in a folder named "support" or "software" and place this folder into the toplevel of the filetree. Name your files and folders clearly. You will want to include a plain ascii-textfile that holds a short description of the folders contents inside of each folder. Name these files "content.txt" or something thelike. Have a short ascii-text file included that describes how to make proper use of the media inside the toplevel of the filetree. Print this information onto the cover or booklet that you are going to give away along with your media. Compare to how this is done with professional software-distribiutions.

If you consider your reel to be put on videotape, make sure you have the proper equipment for video-editing. Use standard tape formats (ie. VHS, SVHS, Hi8 etc.) and make sure to know wether they expect PAL or NTSC or something else.

Be very carefull about how you blend over between the parts of your reel. Avoid "black interupts" like hell. Don't hold on a still at the end of your reel. Doing a slow fade to black looks much better. Look at Holywood-productions and how they do endings.

Using sounds and / or music along with your reel is not a must, but you should keep in mind the persons watching those reels. Make your reel as enjoyable to watch as possible. If you are adding sounds, keep an eye at the copyright-issues. Using the latest top-10-hit might be tempting but can also disqualify you for your purposed employer due to not paying attention to this matter. If you can't get permission to use any given soundtrack, use free materials. Even better: make your own! You can show great means of flexibility and creativity here and trust me: making your own soundtracks is fun.

Aside from the digital stuff you should provide some sketches from your sketchbook. Scan them and include these scans. One can learn a lot from the sketches you do and studios are often very interested in your sketchbooks. Be sure to bring them along when you get an appointment with you possible employer.

Include as many facts about what you want to do and what you can do as possible. Make sure that those people viewing your reel get to know how to contact you. This means to include your name, (business-) adress, phone, fax, email and url. Label the tape / cd / whatever with these informations. Make also sure that your reel includes a well defined copyright-statement. Embed a term of copyright within the images and anims aswell, like (c) by... (refer to my images, if you don't know what I mean.) This is important, since I've learned (from various sources) about companies simply ripping off images and anims from reels and using them without paying the artist for. Because no term of © was included the artist couldn't sue the company easily. As usual: going to court for means of copyright is a really really hard way you want to avoid by any means (until you are a lawyer ;)

Making a reel on a digital media today means most of the times using a CD. Use CDs you know to work well and not to cause problems (ie. Kodak InfoGuard WritableCD's have prooven to be very reliable.) It pays to invest a few US$ into those CDs. Design a cover or even a booklet for this. Maybe you want to make a CD-lable printed onto the CD itself. Using a low-cost sticker-lable is by far less professional and should be avoided. Get hands on some examples to get the right stuff for your CD.

If you are using authoring software do not use those control-icons and decorational stuff that came along with it. Design a control-interface by yourself. Keep in mind that you are going to advertise yourself as an artist! Further, there might apply special terms of © using those items delivered along with the software concerning publishing or business-use etc.

Test your media intensely before giving them away. Let them be tested from a couple of friends you know on various systems to get them bug-free. Perhaps you may want to contact a studio able of producing this for you. Ask several studios in your area since the prices often differ dramatically.

When it comes to choosing the files you should chose about 10 rendered images and around 3 minutes worth of your very best animation. You may include more, but in my experience the client's choice usually depends on no more than this amount of files and especially the way they are presented to the viewer. If possible, use some audio along your anims.

Choose your files depending on the client you are addressing. What might be of interest for an advertiser might not be of interest for a gamedesigner. Whenever possible ask them about what they are interested in before you send them your reel. Let somebody you know reviewing your choice. Somebody else sees your work in a different way then you do yourself, since she isn't involved with your work that emotionally as you are.

Include informations about yourself. Tell them who you are. Tell them what you already did for whom and when. Be proud on your work, but don't be the wise man on campus. Tell them about what kind of education you have solved (preferably along with achieved results) in your profession. Do not make a secret about being an autodidact nor making a first-time-ever application.

Be carefull about including prices or terms of payment or turnaround-times or deadlines or something like this within your reel. You might get nailed on these later.