Show(Reel) Me What You Got

First, a brief video introduction:

That, my friends, is my latest showreel (aka demoreel, aka a personal version of K-TEL’s greatest hits compilation).

Let me back up for a moment.

Over the past few months I have been lucky enough to land a couple of gig jobs doing some video editing. Not a lot of money, to be sure, but definitely enough to help (of course, at this point, Kohl’s Cash is enough to help), and even better, it has really given me a chance to start flexing those atrophying video editing muscles in a professional way. As in, you know, actually getting paid instead of just the aura of “good vibes.”

With this rediscovered toolbox being dusted off and polished and optimized and… uh… okay I kind of lost track of where I was going with that metaphor.

Anyway!

Point being, with my skill set validated like the parking at The Grove, I have been looking at various media production jobs and one of them explicitly called out for a showreel – not just a portfolio of links to various works, but an actual showreel. This was the first time I had seen that, and it got me thinking:

“Self,” I said to myself, “I do believe that it is high time to update my own showreel. Or demoreel, as we called it back in the archaic age of 1997.”

“Why is that?” I replied to myself. (For the record, I have this kind of conversation all the time with myself, but usually I confine them to my head.)

“Well, because the last time I updated my demoreel was, uh, I think back when Pope John Paul II was still cruising in the popemobile.”

“Ah. Okay, yeah. Time for an update.”

Every now and then over the past few years I had indeed thought maybe about redoing the reel, but the big issue was always lack of material. I would be doing a few projects a year, but that’s not really enough to update the showreel, even though they often run only slightly shorter than Liz Truss’ tenure as the UK Prime Minister. Because you often have a lot of cuts and transitions, you need a lot of media to start with.

And this is the weird meta thing about showreels: how do you edit a showreel that shows off your, well, editing skills? See, for something like acting, cinematography, Weltmeister accordion virtuosos, etc., you can basically set up a series of clips from longer works and let them speak for themselves. But for editing, you can’t really do that, because sometimes you actually did the motion graphics but not the editing, or maybe you worked with other editors so all the cuts in one scene aren’t actually yours, or maybe some of the bigger projects you worked on the editing is very straightforward and the whole point of it is to NOT stand out.

Trust me: other video editors will notice the good edits, but EVERYONE notices the bad edits. To quote Micheal J. Nelson “AH! I think I broke my neck in that jump cut!”

I did some research into it and found that these days, yeah, just showing a collection of clips from your projects is not really the way to go; instead, “Treat it like a project of its own” and don’t be afraid to re-edit and change the clips; especially because the real point of the showreel is to “show” (duh) what skills you have.

For me, that broke down to the following areas:

• Pacing

  • This covered the act of cutting on different beats to the music as well as letting longer clips play out

• Titles

  • Okay, those was mostly for fun and to try out a series of different styles, but honestly, a big part of this is showing that you know how to match a title to the video behind it; color choice, masking, SFX, etc.

• Video game trailer editing

  • One of the key points I was making earlier: I have been working on a lot of video game trailer remixes where I did not do the original trailer but have been re-editing them as part of a social media thread. So, here, the flex is not “I worked on these titles” but rather “I know how to do transitions for this type of work.”

• Motion graphics

  • Covering things from animated storyboards to music lyric videos to good ol’ soulless corporate promotional videos. Ah, how I miss those days….

• Sound design

  • A hidden talent a lot of video editors not only have, but have to master. You need to know how (and when) to lower track audio, balance voices, add Sound FX, and boost the gain when the interviewee is in the bathroom with a hot mic and accidentally confesses to a decades-old murder.

• Animation

  • Similar to motion graphics, but this was a reminder that I have worked with computer animation as well. Not just for the stunning beauty of product explainer videos, but for title sequences as well.

• Podcasting

  • Again, you wouldn’t be showing just a podcast clip, but you need to show that you can compose the screen, do transitions, balance the voices, and even better, that you can cut the voices to drive the segment, rather than just cut whenever someone pauses to check their subscriber count.

• Live direction

  • I speak, naturally, of Gracie giving the little “yayyyy” bit at the end. Because Gracie makes everything better. I have verified proof.

Now, it’s anyone’s guess if this will actually help land me more work, but regardless, it was fun to really get in and work on this like the project it was, slowly build it up, and watch it all come together. It is, at least, something that I can send along to job openings with confidence.

And hey, if you’d like to “show” it off to any friends or colleagues who just happen to have a production studio and are looking to hire, well, who am I to stop you?