Making an amateur showreel / portfolio?

[kye]

I visited a site the other day that said it was targeted at professionals and amateurs, but the registration process required a link to your showreel or portfolio, which struck me as a bit strange considering I always associated those with being a pro.

But it got me thinking - why not create a showreel?

Yes, it would be terrible compared to the pros, but I'm not looking for work so in a way, who cares?  It could also be a fun project that could be a real learning experience, especially if I post it asking for feedback.

Has anyone who isn't looking for work or to attract others to a project ever made a showreel or portfolio?  What were your experiences?

The more I think about it, the more it seems like a good idea.

[Anaconda_]

I use showreels as a way to learn a new NLE. It's in my interested to make a good showreel, but there's no time limit, so you can really explore the tools and work out how to get the exact look you want. If possible, work from original material, not cutting scenes out of already finished work. That way you can also learn colouring in the new NLE as you can try to match the original final look.

EDIT: Also, if you're making a reel from your own footage, it's a nice way to analyse your work and work out why this shot looks better than that one etc.

[fuzzynormal]

I'm currently planning to make a reel out of all the 1080 travel footage I've shot over the past 15 years.  Big damn project that requires weeks of completely re-structuring my media storage, catalog management, and then some really long editing days.  Good opportunity to learn a new NLE, new color grading, and practice some new editing techniques.

Ultimately it's an exercise in production.  Getting a video out of it to help sell myself will be a nice bonus.

[kye]

7 hours ago, fuzzynormal said:

I'm currently planning to make a reel out of all the 1080 travel footage I've shot over the past 15 years.  Big damn project that requires weeks of completely re-structuring my media storage, catalog management, and then some really long editing days.  Good opportunity to learn a new NLE, new color grading, and practice some new editing techniques.

Ultimately it's an exercise in production.  Getting a video out of it to help sell myself will be a nice bonus.

That's almost exactly what I'm doing.

I'm only doing holiday videos from the last 3 or 4 years, but there's a sizeable amount of them.  I was doing a first pass on a family trip we did late 2018 and I'm mostly through it, but the selects are something like 2.5 hours long so I have a huge amount of cutting to do!  I was really surprised when I saw that lol.

Luckily I've already gone through the pain of organising the footage onto a single storage device.

Enjoy the process - I really enjoyed reviewing the footage last night and remembering fun times etc 🙂 

On 7/5/2020 at 5:41 PM, Anaconda_ said:

I use showreels as a way to learn a new NLE. It's in my interested to make a good showreel, but there's no time limit, so you can really explore the tools and work out how to get the exact look you want. If possible, work from original material, not cutting scenes out of already finished work. That way you can also learn colouring in the new NLE as you can try to match the original final look.

EDIT: Also, if you're making a reel from your own footage, it's a nice way to analyse your work and work out why this shot looks better than that one etc.

I agree about working from original material and not cutting scenes.  One of the challenges I have with my selects is that I'll select any clips that I think can help tell the story and act as transitions or 'context' shots, which is difficult to tell ahead of time.

My workflow typically follows this broad process:

• Do single pass making selects onto a timeline - choosing anything that might be useful.  I never look at the raw footage again after this, so it's a hard culling pass.
• Sort out the sequence of things (often things aren't in order from different cameras)
• Go through and sort clips into a few categories:  wow shots of people I know, ok shots of people I know, wow shots without people, potentially useful shots without people.
• Then I construct an assembly by including all the wow people shots and many of the wow people-less shots and pulling in the other people shots if I want more coverage of a person and pulling in the useful people-less shots if I need to establish a location or make a transition between locations etc
• Work out how long to make the final piece, then cut cut cut cut cut cut.......  until it's in the ballpark
• Music and any audio
• Cut to the audio
• Grade, Export, Publish

In that sense, being that many shots are chosen for context, of course you'd want to choose differently.  For a showreel (from my understanding) there doesn't have to be any context, it's just shot - shot - shot - shot etc..  If you were making a different format, a compilation or longer piece, then some structure might be appropriate, in which case it would be differently structured again than a showreel.