Showreel

For the design of my showreel I wanted to keep the duration to 1 minute or under - I wanted to make sure that what I had in my showreel was quality rather than quantity; I will be sending this showreel into the industry, showing it to practitioners and animation studios, I need to ensure that the showreel shows the best of the best. 

I used my ending title sequence from my Extended project for the opening and ending sequence in my showreel, I felt that this connection to my final major project worked successfully as the Extended animation was the big project that I spent alot of time on and I wanted to show off what I have done in my showreel.

At first I had two fonts for the opening sequence - a typewriter font and a medieval font from my Extended animation, but through peer feedback I used only one font as it clashed together; I kept the medieval esk font. I made sure that all the other marketing designs had the same layout with the font so that they all connected and looked aesthetically pleasing.

With the ending title sequence, I added all of the social media links that I have, adding icons of the sites to both add to the aesthetic and clearly show the audience what website it is. Unfortunately I couldn't just put my username next to the icon, personally I found that it  not only looked strange but it was confusing as I couldn't tell a few of the sites through their icon and I wanted to ensure that it was easy for the audience to read and to understand. I also added the Leeds College of Art logo and my own logo that I made purely for my Extend animation; I felt that this was a nice addition, it made it look professional. Peer feedback additionally suggested to make the bags eye blink as something needed to happen with the bag, it was the only thing that was static in the sequence. I really liked this addition it worked well with the timing of the music score and made it more aesthetically pleasing.

For the music score I re-used part of the score that Daniel Chant-Burgess made for my Extended animation. I absolutely love the score that he made for me and I felt that it worked really well with my content in the showreel; I timed it well with movements in individual scenes.

My content for the showreel needed to be captivating, with a strong start and a strong finish. I knew I wanted to add my COP3 storyboards, quickly making them into an animatic, alongside my Extended animation however I wasn't sure what else to add in. I looked at the other work that I had done in third year and second year, I really liked my character designs that I made for Becky's animation Rumpelstiltskin, I felt that the best way to show this would be through showing a clip of her animation alongside one of my character designs. After adding these elements together I really liked the aesthetic, it worked well, I just need to make sure that I label each piece of work I show in the showreel so that viewers don't think that the stop motion is my work, as the sole ownership is Becky, only the character designs for Rumpelstiltskin and the Troll King are mine. I labeled these elements in a simple manner, a lower opacity box and a legible typeface, Calibri. I wanted these parts of the animation to be simple so that it didn't crowd the frame and detract the viewers attention way from the content of the showreel.

Additionally I added a clip from second year Food Mod animation, A History of Cake, I felt that this was an important part to add to my showreel. It was my first collaborative animation with fellow students, and I animated a few of the last scenes which I wanted to show off. I felt that this worked quite well in amongst the rest of the content that I had added in from my third year work, as it showed my lip syncing, colouring, editing and animating skills in the clip.

With my final major project animation I decided to use a clip that showed a simple movement but with lots of secondary animation. I felt that the best clip to show this is the medium close shot of Cy as he moves his head down slightly and frowns. I really like this scene, it is simple but it clearly shows the movement and emphasises the change of expression well.

I ended the animation on another clip from my Extend animation, the main dialogue scene where Dusk moves around Cy as he introduces himself and explains about the spyglass. I really liked how this was the ending scene as it shows my animation skills, lip syncing skills, editing and illustrative aesthetic.  Feedback suggested that the audio of the lip sync scenes needed to be added as it shows an important skill of being able to match the audio with the lip sync. Unfortunately with the A History of Cake section,  I wasn't able to find the original file that wasn't with the backing track of the original animation, so I had to leave the clip as it was.

Lastly, I uploaded my showreel to LinkedIn through Youtube, adding it to my summary. I wanted this to be on my LinkedIn profile so that practitioners and studios can look at the work I have done; promoting my work further.