Question about Show/video Reel's

[Wes Coughlin]

Is it better to show actual short clips/samples of previous work? or Is it better to show a montage of previous work?

and approx. how long should one be?

[Glenn Chan]

There's been some past threads on how to do demo reels... if you do a search you'll dig em up.

Anyways, my 2 cents in relation to your questions:
1- The first 15 seconds of a reel is the most important, so you need to put your best stuff there. I wouldn't even waste time with an intro, it conveys little and means that they spend less time viewing your actual work.
Name, contact info, what you do (list ONE thing, not more), and a client list if you had big name clients.

And then just show short bits of your best work. You might want a quick summary of the samples that appear later, that way the person viewing will hopefully skip to what they're looking for. When you have 100 reels on your table, you're probably not going to spend more than 15 seconds for most of the reels.

Whether or not you should do a montage depends on what kind of work the reel is showing. i.e. for editing, I don't think a montage conveys much of the editor's skill.

2- You're probably fine with a reel of about three minutes. If you haven't done that much good work, I would try to keep the reel shorter. Putting student stuff on there could be shooting yourself in the foot.

[Wes Coughlin]

Thanks for your input. If you dont mind, im curious of the comments you might have about my reel so far.

http://www.wescoughlin.icfstore.com/...ideopage2.html

click on the "editor reel" link to view