Show reels or Demo reels are useless. Do this instead.
Christian Ziadeh
Video Director // Creative Producer // Commercials and Documentaries // Creative Director // Award-winning
Before you judge the title, please read on. Yes, I do believe that show reels for video editors is a waste of time to produce, and i'll give you the reasons below. If you want to know what to do instead, well, you have to read on to find out!
1- Time investment
A good show reel will require you to free up at least a day or two to produce. A day or two in an editor's world is kind of a hidden treasure. Good luck finding time!
For busy editors, this means working on the show reel whenever they find time. It is the piece of work that represents you and your work, seeking perfection is a must and cutting corners is a very bad idea!
2- Relevance
A show reel shows everything important you have ever worked on! successful editors branch out to many genres and do not devote themselves to one type of production, your potential client or recruiter want to see something you have worked on, similar to what they want produce! Yes, sure, it's nice to show off big names that trusted your services, but that should take 10 seconds to find out, not 2-3 minutes!
3- Updating
How busy of an editor are you? did someone important hire you just weeks after you finished and launched your reel? and now you feel the need to add to it? How often do you update your show reel? let me stop you right there...
"Updating" your show reel is never a good idea. You have to create an entire reel every once in a while. Most common time frame between one reel and another is a year, but very busy editors would definitely need a new one every 3 months.
4- Convenience
As visual media creators, we enjoy watching stuff. "Other" people however, may find it difficult to concentrate on the most exciting, action packed movies, ever created! More than often I find people distracted, dozing off, or just uninterested watching a show reel waiting to see something relevant to them, and while this 2-3 seconds that might interest them passes, they are most probably looking away.
Keep in mind, whoever needs to watch your reel and be convinced by it, needs to stop what they are doing, put headphones on, forget about their surrounding and submerge themselves into your production. Can you really bet on that?
5- Personal taste
Choice of music, editing style, color correction etc... Are all factors of personal taste, some people might love it, some others might hate it. If you are looking for a job or trying to score a contract, you want to avoid the influence of personal taste.
Unfortunately, the show reel will reflect your personal taste and your preferences of things. Okay, let's go generic! not quite the best of ideas. First you will not feel as attached and proud of your work, and second, your talent is not fully exploited in generic productions. So what't the solution? Diversity and never expose what your preferences are. And that, is not possible with a show reel.
What to do instead?
Simple. Create an online portfolio, or what is widely known as a website.
Don't rely solely on your Behance, LinkedIn, YouTube or Vimeo Channel. And spare yourself the embarrassment of having a weird webpage name that have a bunch of back slashes just to enjoy the perks of free hosting and free domains. You can find prices for hosting a .com or .net domain for as low as 100$ for 2-3 years. Something like www.yourname.com.
For the website building part? Do yourself a favor and learn a new skill if you don't already know coding. Find a Muse or WordPress template and it should not take you more than 2-3 days to learn a new skill and have your site up and running.
And here you go! A website is conveniently updated, will actually introduce your future employee or client to yourself as a person, you can showcase your entire projects so people will look at what is relevant to their needs, It will take them exactly 10 seconds to know who your past clients were, you can explain your general approach and workflow and you can have a platform for people to communicate with you, and most importantly you can do all that while screaming "I will do what YOU need" rather than "That's what I do, take it or leave it." You will have an excellent and complete virtual online presence.
Finally, your website, must be accompanied with a Vimeo account to host your Videos and a LinkedIn account to connect with important people, and don't forget, whenever you are applying for a job or bidding for a project, ALWAYS send 2-3 links or attachments of your most relevant work to the project or job you are interested in.
Visit my website to see an example, and in the future we will be talking more about easy and simple website creation for visual media creators.
Founder of Ardor Ideas managing : AIM Creative Agency, Shine TV Production, 360 Dour, UAE POLO, Dour Metaverse. And Organizer of Unreal engine community in the UAE.
8 年Carlos is right. People who are intreated in editing work, they will ask about your show real which contains your best work, in two minutes instead of going through each video.
Consultant: Motion Design and Video Editing - Adobe Community Expert - Cybersecurity Student (C|EH)
8 年Thanks for this wonderful article ! In my opinion, the website is a must and comes at top of the pyramid, but a well built showreel that can show all your diversified projects in 1 minute could be a nice job as well...there will be clients who dont have time to look at all your works and would simply ask for a showreel that you will have to provide, unfortunately, most of them will watch the first 10 to 15 seconds and tell you they are done. Those just wanna check your aesthetic quality. I don't support this, but this is it... clients ! But at the end of each meeting, 100% of the clients will request your website link, and there goes the power of a good website...