10 Tips for Creating a Successful Animation Showreel

Published on June 25, 2008 by Catherine South in Animation
10 Tips for Creating a Successful Animation Showreel

Your showreel is the first thing about you that a prospective employer will see.

  1. Choose your music wisely. Your choice of music should reflect your style of animation.
  2. Include some lip-synching, and ensure that the entire face is alive while the character is speaking
  3. Try to avoid typical characters such as hard core super heroes and robots. Create a new, unique personality with each character.
  4. Keep it short. Anything from 50 seconds to one minute 30 seconds. Humans get bored and distracted easily.
  5. Create an interesting introduction and title sequence. Try to keep these similar in style, to “bookend” your showreel.
  6. Include your contact details in your showreel. Name, location, phone number, website and email address is usually more than enough.
  7. In your credits, give the names of the programs you utilized to create the showreel
  8. If you’d like to show off your skills in areas other than animation, find ways to creatively display your models, textures, armatures and rendering techniques
  9. Your showreel is the first thing about you that a prospective employer will see. Pretend that you are introducing yourself to the employer through your showreel, and try add some of your own personality to it.
  10. Give your prospective employer easy access to your reel. Phone ahead and ask how they’d prefer to view it. A small version sent as an attachment with an email? A video embedded on your site?
    YouTube
    ? Would they prefer a DVD copy for their records? Make sure that you have all these options available before contacting a company.
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3 Comments

nitin, posted this comment on Nov 26th, 2008

its very helpful for me

abhirut, posted this comment on Jan 19th, 2009

i kind of get restless while modeling , can u suggest how to keep focused and not let boredome and restlessness hinder me?

Sumit Arora, posted this comment on Apr 28th, 2009

that totally depends of u . if u really feel uneasy than take a break & when u feel well jst return back with a bang & start ur thing again. And the most important thing to stay focussed is interest./ Take as much interest as u can , I hope this will work.

Happy Animating :)

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