Tips For Making an Awesome Showreel

Posted August 17th, 2010 / By Matthew Carlin in Resources, Tips

As part of the being in the motion graphics industry, we usually have to create a showreel to show to potential employers or to gather feedback off the community.  Well, I’m going to try and give you some advice on what I think makes an awesome showreel that will hopefully impress employers and community!

My first tip for making an awesome showreel is to keep it short! These days, a lot of people have fairly short attention spans. We’re not going to sit through three and a half minutes of your showreel when we’ve probably seen what we want in the first 40 seconds. This is even more relevant for those trying to begin their careers in the motion graphics industry; keep your reel really short!  As a general rule, if you haven’t got any professional experience or very little experience, keep it under 30 seconds. If you have a few years experience then keep it around 30-50 seconds, and once you have many years professional experience you can push it to a minute or more!

Another great tip for making an awesome showreel is to have style! This could be two things, you may be really good at a particular style of motion graphics such as 2D animation, kinetic typography etc… if you’re good at one of these styles then make sure people know your good at it and show your best pieces!

The flip side of this coin though is also to try and show that you not just limited to one particular style of motion graphics, this is especially true for those trying to find work in smaller motion graphics companies.  You won’t just be doing one style in places like these so you need to show you’ve got a broad range of styles and abilities.

This is something that probably happens to those who are trying to get into the motion graphics industry than those who are already in it. I will admit as well that i was guilty of this myself in the past.  If you just use motion graphics based off tutorials then it will only show that you can copy a particular style or piece, it won’t show what you really need to do when you employed in motion graphics.  What you need to show to get employed in motion graphics is that your able to generate a solution to a problem, just following tutorials won’t show this; we want to see some originality.

I guess this should have been first!  But this is also something that probably ties into the last two points.  If you want to make an awesome showreel, you need to learn about graphic design, what makes things look good, colour theory etc…

I’ve seen showreel’s in the past that demonstrated some good technical work in After Effects or whatever motion graphics program they used, but looked like no thought had gone into how it looked at all–bad colour choices, bad typography etc…

So make sure you learn about graphic design, by doing so you will instantly lift your showreel from ok to good!

Finally

Hopefully you’ve learned something from these bits of advice today, and hopefully you’ll go and apply them to your own showreels. This should take them from good to awesome!  If you want to see some of these examples in practice then swing round to websites like Reel Roulette’s Top 20 .  Also, if you’ve got something that you think makes an awesome showreel, then let us know in the comments!

Hi, I’m from Nottingham in the United Kingdom. I’ve been writing about motion graphics on Motion Design Love for a while now, as well being a Video Editor and Motion Designer by Day. I probably spend most of my waking hours either doing something with motion graphics or thinking about stuff I can do with motion graphics. I’m looking forward to writing some great articles for Fuel Your Motionography, I hope you’re all looking forward to reading them!