Let’s start with this. Despite the reasonable overall quality of animation, this showreel is quite flawed. First there is the audio problem. The music is a little too loud, especially at the beginning where it’s covering up what’s being said in the dialogue, which is cut from various films. There’s also a little issue from poor editing of the music track towards the end.
Some of the clips could do with being a little shorter, especially a the clips towards the end. We linger on the dragon for way too long and we start to see the flaws. The video should never have passed the 1m30s point. He’s made some pretty good animation look very corny. The titling is also vague and there’s no contact details on the video.
This one is pretty darn good, however I feel the structure is a little random. We start with some initial roughs of some different walk cycles, one of which turns into the finished article which makes a nice transition, but from then on, it seems to be clips from a few different projects randomly inter cut with concept drawings. All the work is great, but we could have guessed that from the first minute, the second feels gratuitous. There’s also no contact details.
This one had no trouble giving out the contact details – It even has them in the thumbnail! I thought it was interesting to see the contrast between a working animators showreel and a students. I watched Gemma’s one here and it certainly didn’t feel like 3 minutes, which just proves you have to be really bloody good to be able to go above 1 minute 30. Have I sold myself short or been realistic leaving my own at 1 minute?
In spite of what I just said, it could probably have been a little shorter, since it is much of the same throughout, but it need the time to show both her work on key animation as well as the cleaned up footage.
Her showreel making skills seem to have got her employed on a few great projects, so I can’t poke too many holes.
The animation for this one is stunning, it’s quick cut, in most cases with a really fun soundtrack. Again, it hits two minutes and as we go into the second minute, I check to see how long more its got. It’s got a very uniform style but still explores a few different looks around that.
What’s strange about it, is after all that, we get a name and email address dumped onto the video in Helvetica. What’s that about? I’ve just seen some crazy design going on and now this? It’s a bit of a let down, but it works. There’s also no date on it.
Finley Geen 