I thought the third one fit right in. Well done.

Reel Advice
 

I'm putting together my first reel, promoting myself as a low-budget writer/diector/editor/producer, and would like to get some advice on the best way to present my skills. Most of the reels I have seen are from cinematographers (an area I am not incredibly proficient in), and include chopped shots set to a soundtrack. This won't work if I want to highlight dialogue I have written, or showcase the overall feel of a specific scene/section I have directed. I could just put section-to-section, back-to-back, but I feel that may be too long-winded. I want to show my work, but do it efficiently.

I was thinking on picking a few of my best scenes/sections that range from 3-5 minutes, letting them play in their A/V entirety, separating them by title cards in which I describe my contributions. So...

1) Do you think this is the best way to showcase wherein the goal is to provide a look at the overall work rather than just a technical aspect?
2) How long should a reel like this be?
3) Most of my work is action sports stuff, but I do have one cable commercial under my belt. Unfortunately, the quality of the commerial is not on par with the other stuff I have done. Would you include it to show diversity, or leave it out to maintain a certain level of perceived production quality?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Thanks,
Shane

Music Video and DP Reel
 

This is a music video I shot for a hip hop group called "Libra Project"
The song is entitled "Bridge"

Directors: James Naish and Jethro Rothe-Kushell
Director of Photography: Nick Harris (myself)
Edited by Jethro Rothe-Kushell and Clayton Woodhull

http://harrisfilms.com/videos/bridge.mov

Also, here is my DP Reel. I'd love any feedback you guys can throw at me!

http://harrisfilms.com/videos/dpreelsm.mov

Nick:

You have some really strong stuff on your reel--ballsy use of color and shadow.

There are a few shots that jump out at me as being weaker than the rest:

:15 Mirror shot--the back of the head draws the eye away from the reflected image as it is hotter and seemingly sharper--dilutes the overall image.

:45 hands with gun--although the red/orange cast is more interesting than if it had been white light, it's otherwise not a particularly strong image (especially coming from the one preceding it, which certainly is).

1:23, 1:28. 1:32: the sequence of the three peeps sitting against the newspaper wall doesn't do much for me, a bit murky and flat.

Again, these are just the images that I picked out as being not up to the high standard you set with your other work. You might be able to mix things up a bit more, especially in the first 30 seconds--knowing that most people who might hire you will make up their minds during this period, it's best to stack your strongest and most diverse images up front.

Great work, look forward to seeing more of your efforts! What camera (and I'm guessing, 35mm adaptor?) are you using?

95% of the shots were done with my XL2, on the stock 20x lens with no filters. All color effects you see were produced with gels and in camera settings... No color correction whatsoever (with the exception of the greenish night shots with the Mexican guys sitting aroudn a table drinking... one is on a jib). I did my best to learn how to make it most look like film, and worked within those limitations. Each of the projects on that reel were shot super, super low budget. I don't know if that knowledge helps or hinders the work, but it's an example of what I can extract with minimal funding (i suppose my hope is that a producer will see it and say "I want to see what he can do with a REAL budget!").

Yeah, in retrospect, I actually have a much better shot from that scene in the mirror which doesn't have his head in the foreground. That shot, along with the dolly-in preceding it (same actor), and the two shots of the indian girl in the park were done on my HVX right after I bought it (first project I shot on that camera actually).

my immortality (preview)
 

http://www.box.net/public/mb3nj4lhs1

just a preview of a film we're almost done shooting



(this was deleted cuz i had it double posted in the letus forum.. i took out that post and put this one back because theres more non-letus shots than letus shots in this preview. thanks)

The whole series of these
 

3 free Filmmaking educational videos for beginners

SHOT TYPES
http://www.sonnyboo.com/onlinemovies/shottypes.htm

180 DEGREE RULE
http://www.sonnyboo.com/onlinemovies/180degree.htm

FAST & SLOW CUTTING
http://www.sonnyboo.com/onlinemovies/fastslow.htm


These are aimed towards complete beginners and will be marketed to High School and early colleges for sales with this type of video in a series on DVD.

We shot in HDV with the JVC HD110 camera in both 24P and 30P modes and I edited in Avid Xpress Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 along with some work in After Effects. Mike Tavares was the shooter for me and the BMW was on loan from Buzz Productions. The crane shots come courtesy of Sean McHenry & Deep Blue Edit, plus TJ Cooley helped a lot on the shoot.

Thanks all.
Peter John Ross
www.sonnyboo.com

feedback on the shots.. anyone?

Mock-Infommercial "The Wangtastic"
 

Hey folks,

A quick short I threw together with a couple of friends over a free weekend last summer. There's some obvious things I'd like to fix . . . however, since it is a mock-infommercial we wanted to retain that cheesy feel. This certainly made for a lot less pressure in the trying-to-make-it-look-really-cool department.

Would love to get some feedback. Here's the link. Thanks.

http://medialab.ifc.com/film_detail....id=2450&list=1

Hey I've written, produced, and directed lots of infomercials. Comedy is the hardest thing. I think this would be better if it was about half as long. I liked the notion of connecting him to the vacuum cleaner. and i appreciate that you didn't find the need for graphic vulgarity.
Kudos to whoever picked the music--it's perfect--we use to spend days mulling through that kind of generic garbage. It makes my skin crawl hearing it.

Here's an opening for a infomercial i did for a recliner. I was trying to be funny.
http://tinyurl.com/ye7qbp

And here's a mock infomercial by the morris brothers that I think is funny/silly.
http://tinyurl.com/yc6anx

They've got a REALLY funny one on that sight called reginald santori. I think the guy who stars in these videos is a genuine comic talent with potential hollywood chops.

How did you render it? file size? resolution? etc

Link doesn't work...

Gunleik

Nice footy, audio & CC

Dunno really about the movie.
Is it a short? (when finished)

Gunleik

YouTube says "This video has been removed by the user."

Hmmmmm...one of these should work...


http://tinyurl.com/vst6m


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRypCKxCsj0

thanks... when finished itll be a short.. no color correction used at all.. all manipulation of the white balance.

that bad huh?

Hey Brian,

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, again, I saw an opportunity for a lot of things to do different . . . one of which was to tighten it up and make it shorter. We really wanted to preserve that goofy feel that a lot of the infommercials of even a few years ago had. Ridiculous invention, crappy acting and cheesy music and scenes overall. I definitely wanted to keep it "innocent" so to speak. Even though it's for a very personal product, I wanted to keep it fun and relatively PG.

On the subject of the music. That was all done by Chris (the co-director) in his home studio. It turned out phenomenal. He did a great job and he took the music in a different direction than I originally thought, but it ended up being the right choice.

To your point about the length, I should've kept it to :30 or 1:00 max in keeping w/ traditional infommercial length. May try recutting . . but then again this was kind of a quick exercise.

Did the all the cutting in Final Cut. Rendered using Sorenson Video 3 and compressed the audio w/ IMA 4:1. If I remember correctly, I think we ended up with about a 40 meg file (320 x 240). The site we posted to capped it to I think 50 or maybe 80. So the nice thing was we were able to keep a nice amount of detail.

Please Watch my New Reel! :)
 

Hey Everyone!
I just Finished my reel and would like to know what everyone thinks. I used AE for some of the titles and Vegas to Edit. The Footage is mostly XL2 and GL2 footage.

SAVE TARGET AS

http://blip.tv/file/get/PeppeNB-NewBeginningReel907.mov

If you have more time, check out my site to!
www.nbfilms.us

My 2 cents...I liked your reel, the only thing is I feel like you went too long on the music video part. I got it in the 1st 30 seconds. I had to wait too long to see what other kinds of work you do, ie...commercials and promotional video.
I also checked out your website. Very nice. Easy to navigate and find contact information. Nice job.

Yea, i know the music video part is alot longer then the others but that's my target and what i want to do the most. I dont really have alot of commercials/promotional videos to show.

Thanks on the website to!

I thought your reel was great, and you had a pretty diverse range of projects you've worked on. I watched one of your music videos and was entertained by it.

/// moving images ///
 

Hello everyone,

Its been awhile since I've posted anything. My new site has launched. Please check it out when you can. Thank you for your time and support.

Mike D

http://www.mdfilms.net

Demo Reel - HELP
 

http://www.psynema.com/phillycrew/cl...aa353e27879133


Hey all - here's a rough cut of my Demo Reel - just have to dust it a bit, but let me know what you think and particularly if there are any spots that lag to you and if any shots should go, be re-ordered etc.

Thanks

music video: flamingosi feat Karolina - ti i ja
 

Music Video for the popular serbian band.

XDCAM + Pro35 + Cooke S4/i

www.artvark.co.yu/showreel/flamingosi.htm


Cheers!

This looks fantastic, I loved the opening shots and night time street locations!

Very nice production value, shows what we can really accomplish with video these days.

Regarding the content: we want more lightsabers!

UK HDV Feature for free download.
 

Hello, I finished a feature last year that I shot with the JY-HD10u.
I converted the 1280x720 29.97 to 24p for editing.

There is a divx available for free download on their stage 6 site if
anyone is curious (it's 82mins):

http://stage6.divx.com/members/390384/videos/1084832

The final picture size was 1920x816 (the divx is 720x304)

Many thanks

Colin Bishop

Tie - Some Kind Of A Roadmovie
 

The title of our new short movie really is "Tie - Some Kind Of a Roadmovie" :)
It's still very much a wip, but we have a cute little teaser trailer out if you want to see. The site is http://koti.mbnet.fi/zenig/tie/

Critic and questions are more than welcome :)

I love the style of it! But I think it's a little obscure. I can't quite tell what it's about...unless that was your intention and you are going to release a more "explanatory" teaser eventually.

Yes, it's pretty much just a first touch teaser since we didn't have that much footage yet. Just to get people on their toes ;)

I just feel like I need a little bit more to actually tease me. Again, loved the style of it, but don't know that I'm interested in the content...yet.

I agree. Nice job.

Thanks for your comments. Ironically, I may need to make an "Acura Retreat" video. We've had a lot of developments in the last 24 hours. Here in Hawaii the Navigation systems don't work in most of our cars and someone at Acura Headquarters finally figured it out.

Unfortunately the guys in the legal department are now involved. Without consultoing us, they've removed all our outstanding orders for TL-S, RDX Tech and everytihing above the base MDX. They've also frozen all our in-transit cars with navigation. I have 5-6 people with orders on these cars.

We are trying to work something out with Acura that will allow us to ontinue to sell these models, but at this point it is looking pretty bad. If Acura is unable to resolve the Navi issue, and/or we are unable to resolve any potential legal issues, it is looking like we won't be allowed to order any Tech Packages in the future.

This effecively wipes out half the product line for us, with serious repurcussions on my earning potential! Acura Retreat!

Harboring Terrorism Documentary Trailer
 

Hey everyone,

This is the link for the trailer for my new film about modern day pirates. To answer your question, yes they are real. Let me know what you think. We self funded the trailer and are seeking outside dollars to finish a feature length film.

http://www.harboringterrorism.com

DVX Soap makes ABC contest semi-finals
 

I produce a college soap opera called The Gates. The first episode had issues but now clips from the second one have made it to the semi-finals of ABC's Soapnet contest. They can be viewed here: http://www.soapu.com.

Everything was filmed on the DVX100 although the one falling through the glass table shot was done on PD150.

Since I had to take a 40 minute show and compress it to ten minutes so much has been cut out, rearranged or edited down that it's hard to ask for comments on a lot of it since I know that's not what the final version will look like. I was wondering what you guys thought of the final chase scene as that actually was kept more or less intact. It's also the one scene that I really spent the most time storyboarding.

Also, do you think there are too many shots with camera movement in the episode overall? I had just got a new stabilizer (that $14 steadycam) before making the episode and I'm afraid I may have gone overboard with it.

The main problem I ran into while shooting was lighting (we don't have any except for some totas that keep burning through my gels). In order to fix that I'm having my school's TV station order some kits and I've spent Winter Break reading Painting With Light and the Set Lighting Technician's Handbook. That's not to mention how much I've been scouring these forums getting lots of great info that I can't wait to apply toward making Episode 3 great. My goal is to maintain a soap opera feel with the lighting but without that flat feeling that so many of them have.

The two main problems I ran into while editing were audio mixing and color correction. Our mics aren't very good and pick up a huge amount of noise. And you can always tell when there's a cut because the white noise in the background changes. Do you think a muff or something would help in that case? Or is there a way to fix it in post with Adobe's suite? As for CC, I tried to do most color correction in camera but, still there are a lot of times when it still appears off. Does anyone have a good tutorial for doing CC in Adobe? Or should I just invest in Magic Bullet?

Also, if you guys do happen to enjoy it please vote for it.

funny
 

I am still downloading the movie, but the title, and the trailer have really caught my attention. It had me laughing. Looks like its going to be great. Did you shoot with a vanilla HD-10 or did you shoot with a 35mm adapter?

-Alan

I'm pretty sure that link doesn't work, so if it doesn't try this one:

http://s90140792.onlinehome.us/Edits/reel07.mov

Just watched the trailer on your main site, and will download the feature now for viewing later this week when I get a chance.

Looks promising.

Watch Inhuman Resources on Mark's blog
 

A few months ago I shot three "webisodes" for Turner Broadcast for their new website Super Deluxe.

Check out my blog to see the first episode and to access links to the second episode. Third one is coming at some point. While you wait for the next episode you can look at my blog and check out the archives. Yes, I'm a blogslut.

Please vote for the episodes so that Mark can get hired again and make rent money. There are also a lot of other great videos on the site. The column on the right has five hearts, click on the fifth heart. It's that good :~) . You may have to register, but it's pretty quick and painless.

Thanks!

-Mark

Interesting video player on the blog. Is the code available?