standards

For animators, the standard showcase of your work is often the showreel, which is perhaps even more important in this modern, digital age. The advent of YouTube, etc. has made it stupidly easy for to create and upload a showreel of your experience and creativity and with good cause too. The ability to be able to broadcast yourself worldwide for free should never be underestimated.

So without further adieu, here’s Nichola Kehoe’s showreel for 2011:

http://vimeo.com/30731775

Nichola by the way, is a young Irish animator who clearly has a fine career ahead of her.

What’s so good about the showreel? Well it adheres to a few gold standards:

• It’s not too long, clocking in at just under a minute. This isn’t iron-clad, but no 15 minute compositions please.
• The music isn’t distracting (no Swedish goth metal to clamour for your attention)
• It displays a variety of styles, which proves she’s not just a one-trick pony
• It’s new. It displays recent stuff, not stuff from 5 years ago or from college that may no longer be relevant to your abilities or even the kind of work you’re looking for.

For comparison, also check out the showreel of my good compadre and Australia’s other favourite son, Elliot Cowan. It plays by a slightly different set of rules than Nichola’s, but it still adheres to the basic ones; not too long, a variety of styles (including personal stuff) and relatively recent in age.