Demo Reel: my first demo reel

[Benork]

Really nice showreel. Stylistic use of cameras, nice models (especially the artifical environment) and great music. however it is ruined by the awful compression. Try using div-x. Its such a shame how some great scenes can be ruined by bad renders and compression.

Apart form that its great :thumbsup:

[Benork]

On watching it a second time, the music hisses. Again sort out the compression and u have a great showreel mate.

[stephen2002]

I'll work on the compression. I realise that everybody here has DivX but I belive that the majority of computer users don't DivX on their system. Plus for some reason I'm having issues getting it to encode with DivX using VirtualDub. I didn't notice the static in the music; probably because I'm working on a laptop with the built-in sound and an old 3-piece Boston speaker set. It's MP3 compression on the sound.

[robingfx]

I am sorry man, but your reel needs some serious help. The only thing that I find somewhat interesting is the landscape towards the end of the reel, but I assume that was generated by a landscape generator. You should show that first because that is the best thing on your reel.

The very first shot (not including the 20 seconds of wasted time in the beginning) is a car running dead center with some weird looking smoke behind it. Is that what you want to show a potential client? I would totally take that out completely. If you are trying to show off your modeling skills (because that car looks fairly nice), there is no need for all those straggling leafless tress in the background, or the poor sparks/snow/rain/fog/volumetric light clichés.

Get rid of those green lines twirling around for 10 seconds in between every segment. Do you think that someone will sit thought that? I don’t even find it interesting looking.

The children’s tower looks fairly good. Try adding LOTS OF DETAILS. Right now it looks like a game almost. And be gentle with all the fog. Just because you can make fog doesn’t mean you should pump it up to 99%. Try some more intriguing camera angles too. All the shots are straight forward panning up/down/in/out. Tilt the camera, look straight down etc. I like the tall chair. Nicely pushed design.

Take the Sep 11 segment out. It may bother some people and it isn’t that good. If you choose to keep it, don’t zoom around in an empty airplane for 10 seconds. How interesting can seats be??? The textures are awful!! What is that last thing that you show for about .5 seconds?

The Blender segment is cool. Keep that. Speed up the ball in the beginning. The ball in a pinball game never rolls that slow.

There you go man! Hope you don’t feel offended.

[stephen2002]

Well, harsh criticism is better than no criticism at all. And you didn't even notice the two spelling mistakes in my titles (upload of the corrected version in progress)! And you call yourself a critic ;)

Most of this is rather old stuff (well, if you consider last year old) and none of it was created specifically for the purpose of inclusion in a demo reel. Most of it is high-school Television Production projects and the rest was random tests that I did in-between studying and learning PHP.

This was created mainly just to test the waters and take a shot at creating a reel; I don't intend to show this to anybody important. I'll be trying again next year when I have some new (and hopefully better) stuff.


Benork: I tried encoding it a couple of times at different settings with DivX and the quality change while keeping the same file size was negligible. I am using an MPEG4 codec already so that is to be expected.

[sudog]

Mostly fun to watch. What's the name of the background music?

The sceneries are especially nice. I found myself a little uncomfortable watching the 9/11 mock-up.

[stephen2002]

I recorded the music off of a radio broadcast a while back so I'm not 100% sure what it is. To the best of my knowledge the track is "Adiemus" by "Adiemus".

[robingfx]

Stephen,

I understand that you just put this together to test the water, as you said. I hope you weren't offended by my criticism.

A poor demo reel can be good with a few changes I think. Oftentimes just by taking out a lot of junk it’ll look better. I think we all tend to put everything we’ve ever done in our reels.

At least now you have a good base to improve your reel. Keep posting your stuff and I bet it’ll look really good in a while. What are you working on right now? Are you planning on improving some of the stuff?

Later

[stephen2002]

I have no plans to change anything that is currently in the reel; all of it is long finished. The only thing I might re-do is the Children's Tower seeing as how most people think it is the best piece that I have. It was done back when I was using a 200MHz laptop with 32MB RAM so the visuals in that were basically at the limit of what I could produce with that mashine; in fact I couldn't render it myself I had to use a friends computer.

I'm on the path to learning Lightwave (most of the CG in the reel was done with Blender and while it is a quite capable program I feel trapped by it's limitations) so next year's reel will probably be made up more of Lightwave material and hopefully some more animation type work.

[Rei Ayanami]

Lightwave is good.

[UnlikelyCorny]

The one good thing about a very bad critic is that it makes others curious. So I decided to download the 40 mb clip. Can't say anything yet though. I still have 15 minutes to go. Till that time don't stress. As we say in Holland: "Als ze gaan zeikuh, dan kennuh ze de terink krijguh."

transl: there are no bad critics, just misplaced ones.

[UnlikelyCorny]

Well I've seen it now and....It isn't that bad, don't throw it away.
Overall it makes one think one is dealing with a small company that makes simple 3d animations for quick, not to expensive boardroom presentations, games and for small television stations inbetweens and basicly there's nothing wrong in that. Such customers are looking for this... not for lord of the rings material.

About the car in the beginning, nothing wrong with it. Except maybe for the text which suggests that we actually are looking at a desirable model, which we're not. We're looking at an idea of a car, an icon, not a real car. Something from a game. The twin towers bit? No problem, but than again I'm not American. To me it's showing that you could produce an animation for a news item dealing with a reconstruction of something, that's all.

One thing which did bug me though were the green 'almost death experience' tunnels in between ending in stottering animation and bad copy which is supposed to make me excited. There to long and to much like a cheap filter thingy. Get rid of those and ask a real copyrighter to write some proper texts for inbetween scenes.

Besides that, not bad at all...

Oh and the music is Enigma if I'm not wrong (puts the entire thing a bit more into games (Magic Carpet Stuff), not very good for serious news flashes, so maybe not that suitable in the end)

[stephen2002]

Thanks for the detailed reply. I don't plan on throwing it out, I just probably won't do much with it right now. I figured that the green tunnell effect would be either a great thing or too much, I suppose it is too much. The text in-between was just the titles of each segment so you know what they are called.

The car is modeled off of a real car, although I couldn't make it look much more realistic than it is with Blender's surfaces.

I chose the music because just about every demo reel out there has technoish music; not that that's a bad thing I just wanted to see what the response would be with something else.

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