The Anti-Showreel

A showreel is a pretty standard marketing tool for animators and motion studios like Never Sit Still . Usually around a minute long, showreels are filled with very short snippets of an artist’s finest work to try and wow their audience. All killer no filler is the rule of thumb for creating a showreel in an attempt to make it stand out amongst the crowd. The thing is, they rarely do. Even the good ones barely stand a chance of cutting through the clutter as they feel almost identical to all the other showreels out there.

As an example, here is our current showreel.

Over the years I’ve become less and less interested in having a showreel and it’s felt like more of an obligation, rather than a beneficial tool for marketing and attracting new business.

My issue with showreels is that they don’t say much. In fact, they don’t really say anything at all, as they’re generally a bamboozling edit of fast-paced motion that’s difficult to digest. To add to that, they’re outdated almost as soon as they’re launched. We’re always striving to make each project better than the last, so showreels quickly become obsolete due to newer projects that we’d rather share, and keeping a showreel up to date becomes a hassle.

I’ve watched our clients expressions in meetings when our showreel comes to an end, and while they seem to have enjoyed the flurry of high intensity motion, they don’t really understand what they just watched, and still don’t have much of an idea of what our studio actually does.

Most of our clients seek our expertise, looking for us to guide them through the motion process. They want us to understand their strategy and make meaningful motion that aligns with their brand.

They are far more interested in how our work will perform in their market, and much prefer to have us talk them through relevant examples of our previous projects.

I’m always trying to think of unique ways to tweak and refine Never Sit Still’s strategic approach to new business. Finding new ways of doing things that are different to the norm, out of category, and exclusive to us.

We decided to switch up our approach to the overdone showreel by ditching it altogether.

We’ve made a new style of video to replace our showreel that actually speaks about how we approach our animation process, what it’s like to work with our team, and how we’ll get to the end result together with our clients.

We calling it our Anti-Showreel, a fresh take on the tired, traditional style of its kind.

Whilst loaded with super snappy content, it’s an exciting and engaging video with clear and concise messaging to capture the ethos of our studio and explain the process behind our work. We designed every element from scratch, showcasing our strengths across the many disciplines we work with, including graphic design, illustration, 2D, 3D, compositing, and video editing with live action footage.

Here's a look at some key style-frames.

With this project being incredibly important to us as an effective marketing tool, we engaged the best in the business for both the script and the audio.

Ian Haigh from Ketchup Partners helped us develop our script with his copywriting prowess, bringing our ideas to life in an engaging way using our tone of voice. Fun, but not too playful. Succinct, but not sterile.

Smith & Western Sound are our long time audio partners, and they composed a custom music track, along with sound design that elevates the end product to a whole new level.

Our team had a blast working on this project. We hope you enjoy it and learn a little more about our animation process!

Here’s the result.