20 Tips for Demo Reels

Every January I have a cohort of students that nervously start to prepare their demo reels. They finish the program in April, so they have about 16 weeks to put it together.

This is some of the advice I give them.

✅ You are only as good as the worst piece on it. Edit it ruthlessly.

⏳The people who watch them are very busy. Keep it as short as possible, 30 seconds is fine.

🥇 Always put your best piece first.

💥 Some people like to put their second best piece last, to end their reel with a bang. I'm nervous that the reviewer might bail long before the end. I generally recommend to put your second best piece second, then your third best piece, etc…

🎶 Don't stress too much about music, they are often watched with the audio down.

👌You don't need a fancy name slate at the beginning. Just make it clear, state your name and the position you want to be considered for. Honestly, these days you don't need a name slate at all, all that info can be in the YouTube description. Just get to the good stuff quick.

✅ If your work looks like something easily found in a tutorial, no matter how complex it is, it doesn't reflect positivity on you. Take the concepts and craft something different.

👍 If you're going for comp, a ‘before and after’ is very helpful. Even better if there's a freeze frame that wipes from one to the other. Make it obvious what you've done.

💯 Breakdowns are helpful, but use them wisely. We don't need to see each AOV being slowly wiped on for 15 seconds to understand that you use layers in your comp. But knowing that you seamlessly painted out wires going over a foreground character’s face is very helpful.

🤔 Use the video description area on the YouTube page to make point form notes on what you did on each shot. Keep it short and to the point.

😵 If it's a group project, note what you did specifically.

🤷 It's cool to go into detail about HOW you did something. Use OBS to capture your Houdini or Nuke setup and quickly step through it with some text callouts.

💡If you're going for VFX lighting, have some shots that show integration and light matching with a live action plate.

👌 People generally like it if you embrace the latest techniques. For example, show that you understand sequence-based lighting in Katana or Houdini/Solaris.

🧐 That being said, you should know the basics of Maya since that's still the glue that holds a lot of pipelines together.

🔧If you're trying to get into assets, show clear wire frames. High res stills are appreciated.

🧐You might want to consider an Artstation account. It's a great way to organize projects into pages. You can embed many forms of media, not just videos and stills. If you're into assets you could upload your model to Sketchfab so the reviewer could rotate and examine the model themselves (and this can be embedded into your Artstation page as well). It's free as well.

💪An advantage of an Artstation page is that you can edit and add to it, while you can't do that with YouTube videos.

🤬And if you upload concept art or stills of your work, use anti-scraping tools like Glaze to prevent your work being stolen by AI companies.

🙏 Make it easy for people to view it. Think carefully if you really need to put it behind a password.

I'm sure I forgot some, please add to the list. I’d love to hear from some HODs to get their perspectives. Hopefully job postings will start to pick up in the coming months and things will get back to the usual crazyness, rather than the insane crazyyness of 2023.