DEMO REEL 2020 // Mònica Eggert from Mònica Eggert on Vimeo.
Heyya, everyone, Alyssa here to bring you a couple of demo reels that I personally found interesting to look at. I found these all from an animation subreddit of people ranging from students to professionals sharing their works through demo reels and other methods. Here they are:
This one is from Owen Smith, and this one primarily focuses on his capabilities with first-person animation. I have plenty of nice things to say about it, especially in the presentation. A lot of times with these styles of animations, it can get monotonous real fast when you're just watching various guns being shot over and over again. However, he keeps it dynamic by changing up the background by making it animated and changing color per gun as well (a demo reel I decided not to show here had the problem of having a monotonous background in these demonstrations). The main critique I have, however, is the use of copyrighted material. Although he credits it all at the end, he uses a Rolling Stones song and various sound effects from other video games for the gun sounds. I also do not know what those projects were for initially. It would have also been nice to indicate which of the model credits go where, and it can be done in the description of the video. Overall, way to make what could be a monotonous specialty to display more interesting!
This next one is from Sarah Abbott, a 2D animator. She really does a good job with music choice, prioritizing her best work in the front, and giving a brief variety with her projects. There is a perfect amount of time spent on each animation, and they each have a purpose and reason for fitting on the reel. My critiques for this one I'll keep brief: in the section with the dialogue, one of the character's lines get awkwardly cut off mid-speech and it's a little jarring on an editing standpoint. She could have cut it off before that character started the line. In addition, I cannot tell what role she had in these animations, whether she did some aspects of it or all of it. Those can be recorded in the description as well, so it can be easier to tell from someone looking at this in an internship standpoint what she did. Either way, I found this animation to be relatively smooth (with the exception of that one editing mistake) and displays the variety of what she can do.
Time for a professional one to end it off. This is David Han, a professional character animator who has worked on numerous studio films, and won an Annie for his character animation work on Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. I thought it would be intriguing to include an accomplished professional on this list to see how a professional does a character reel. It's clear that he has a specific style in his character animations, with a lot of the scenes in display being action-heavy scenes with a few more toned down scenes in the mix (such as the segments with dialogue from Storks and Into the Spiderverse). I also found it interesting that he included play-blasts as well to demonstrate an aspect of his process un-rendered. In the description, he says that this is a "for funsies" version of a demo reel, but the way that the content is included and the fun framing device for the reel can serve as inspiration. Again, music is from a video game so we need to make sure to avoid those styles of music for our personal projects. Either way, this is definitely one to look at.
That's all I have for now, and I'm looking forward to putting together mine for what's to come!
Alyssa out!
