Maya Generalist Reel '09

[comfortk]

My Eyyyyyyeeeeeeesssss

[Daemonecles]

Haha thanks for the vote of confidence Kyle.

[mwgriffin]

Looks great! Keep up the good work man! :D

[borisignjatovic]

Cool stuff you got there.. Keep up

[veljko-lemonade]

nice work!
i thought the reel was well balanced

:)

[d4wn0fF473]

You have some good stuff on there, but it could be organized a little better.

I would take out the classification of generalist though. Most of the time where you end up you will be responsible for one type of task unless its a really small operation. Its fine if you have general knowledge of everything, but truthfully anyone can be a generalist if they study the materials long enough. That's what consultants are for. You need to create something that says hey I specialize in this, but I can also do this.

From the reel it looks as though you really want to do lighting, and comping. Since its a generalization reel I don't know what your shooting for so its hard to judge, but if you want to do animation what you have isn't enough. If you have a reel that shows a specialization then it can be critiqued well, and we know what you are shooting for so that we can tell you if its working or not.

Anyway, my 2 cents of crit is this. If you want to animate you need much more, the simple stuff you have there is not going to grab enough attention to get you a job animating. You don't have any majorly interesting poses worked into most of it, and its all significantly swimmy, except for the procedural scene where the robots fall out of the restraints. Don't be afraid to make the reel longer either. because they turn it off in the first 10-15 seconds if they don't like it anyway. But if they like it you want to have the content to keep them interested.

If you want to do lighting and comping it would be nice to see breakdowns of the lights and comps. This is the major fault in a generalist reel, you can't include everything because it wouldn't make sense. I'd also say that if you want to go for lighting you should probably look at color theory a little more, becasue the only lighting that you have thats working really well is in the hampster scene, the rest of it is really flat, and needs some work.

I will keep saying this too, generalization is the enemy, you need to target something. If you target make sure to look around at other peoples reel construction as well.

[Daemonecles]

@ borisignjatovic, mwgriffin, veljko-lemonade: Thanks a ton, can't wait to get out there :).

@ d4wn0fF473: So far from my experience most of the people I've worked with, freelancers and staffers have Generalist reels and it seems to get them through. When I do think about specializing though I'll narrow it down and try to seem more focused in my efforts so that crit is definitely sensible.

The reel was hastily put together and doesn't have a bunch of side projects in there (I will have a more generalized reel with more in depth stuff for modeling/lighting/and animation coming up when I graduate. So you're definitely right in that case!

Insofar as the lighting comments I agree wholeheartedly, it's too bad I didn't get out most of the other lighting stuff to bolster that side, but as a whole I have reviewed tons of reels and most exiting school/1 year of experience are suggested to stay at 1 minute so I'm really trying to keep either sub 1 or around one. In the end though thanks for the amazing crit, it was really helpful to read and I definitely agree with some of your points wholeheartedly.

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