OUAN502 - Pitch Perfect, Showreel

Aside from the website and the finances, it was also my job to produce the show reel. As a group we made a folder on Google drive so that everyone could place work that they would like to feature on the show reel into it. The show reel quite a simple task as I've made show reels before and I've become quite familiar with Premiere Pro, so I decided to make the studio a simple ident to run at the beginning of our show reel. The concept was straight forward, I simply had the lines of pixels appearing one after the other to create a falling affect. Aside from this I allowed things to fade in an out at a speed I thought would be long enough for the ident to be seen but not too long as to take up too much time. It was an incredibly simple ident but I thought it worked quite well with the simple logo design and made it so it transitioned quite nicely into the main show reel. The falling effec that was created with the pocket was done by separating the different rows of pixels from the pocket onto separate layers in Photoshop so they could be worked with individually. Once this was done the Photoshop was imported into After Effects with the ability to edit the different layers enabled.

The show reel itself was quite a fun task as I got to experiment further with sequencing and pacing of clips in terms of how they work together. I did try to use a clip with a black background so that the fade from the ident transitioned directly into a clip without the contrast being too jarring. I had about 15 different pieces of work to use throughout the show reel, the work ranged from work done last year and early in this year and from various modules that we had done. There was also some personal work that people were pleased with and wanted to include as well as pieces entered for competitions - overall there was a good range and this made my job easier due to the variation I had to sequence together. The music for the show reel was sourced from a royalty free music site. However, there were songs that I much preferred and if we were making this for real I would have been keen to buy the track for the purpose of a more professional show reel. Despite this, the track we ended up using did give the show reel a more upbeat feel and worked quite well in the end with the type of work we were showing. I did make some final adjustments towards the end of the making process so that some of the clips fitted the pacing of the music better, improving it and making sure it worked better as a collaborative piece between the music and the visuals. We wanted the show reel to also feature on the website we created so I uploaded the final reel to Vimeo so that it could be easily embedded onto the site. I think the making process of the show reel has given me some valuable experience in making show reels and what types of things should be considered when presenting work, especially animation. I am pleased how it turned out and I believe some of the processes I was made aware of will be applied to any show reels I make in the future.

Pixel_Pocket_Showreel from Joe Baker on Vimeo.