Demoreel 2010

This is my old Demoreel. It was made in 2011/02 with content from 2010 and a breakdown in the Vimeo video description. This post is about the process of creating the reel and the results in retrospect. Because it is almost one year old, I may have forgotten a few things.

Parzival Roethlein - Character TD Reel 2010



Making-of:

• Decided on resolution and frame rate. (720p and 25fps)
• Made Maya playblasts (project was not rendered yet) to show animated rig. (720p, 25fps)
• Screen captures with CamStudio (free), to demonstrate rig functionality. (720p, fps not important, since I speed up the screen captures anyways)
• The video files from CamStudio and Maya playblasts were then converted to a image-sequence (jpg or png), using VirtualDub (also free). This way it is fast to work with the data when editing and rendering the final video. 
• Title and description texts made in Photoshop.
• Image sequences and texts imported to Adobe After Effects for editing and final video export. The style of rig presentation with frame-freezing, then blurring and animating the text was popularized by Victor Vinyals (I think) with his demoreel in 2007.
• Spent one day for first version, gathered feedback, then one more day for final version.

Results:

• Because I am a student I only applied for jobs in the two semester breaks of 2011.
• For the first semester break in March I applied at around six German companies as a freelancer. I would say one third did not answer, the others gave nice responses, but only the one that actually had a relevant job listed on their website hired me. (Animationsfabrik)
• For the second semester break I wanted to get a rigging-internship at a big studio in a foreign country. So I applied at two companies in London and two in the US. One of the US studios told me I was in the final selection, but I did not hear from them afterward. The other US studio send me a rejection (cg software internship). From the two London companies one did respond and I got the internship there (Framestore). I also entered this reel to the "Computer Graphics Student Awards" on cgCoach.com and won an internship there, but since I already had an internship by then, it did not really matter.