My Demo Reel

Hey everybody. Dan here.

As some of you know, for the past couple of years I've been studying Computer Animation at Full Sail University in Orlando, FL. The last bit of time at school was spent working on my first Demo Reel. Essentially a demo reel is an animation portfolio containing a few short scenes that demonstrate what kind of stuff I am capable of for prospective employers. It's what I'll use to get a job - hopefully. Otherwise I'll just continue pitching in on Ross's soon-to-be award winning series of books.

I recently submitted my reel to the 2008 aniBoom Awards Animation Festival. Essentially this is an annual competition put on by the YouTube of the animation world, aniBoom.

So if you have a minute (1 minute and 20 seconds to be precise), and want to watch my efforts, I've included my reel in this very post. After watching it if you have another 10 seconds or so to kill, and want to help your friend Wheezy out, go give my video a ranking over at it's aniBoom page.

Hope you like it! Thanks for taking the time to watch it.

The competition goes through December 14th, so I imagine I'll be mentioning this again sometime within the next couple of weeks. Indulge a poor unemployed animator.

Animation Mentor Fall 2007 Showcase

Howdy everybody. I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but I graduate in November. If my calculations are correct that means I'm going to have a Bachelor's in Computer Animation in approximately... 8 months. That's less than a year! Yowza.

In the last three months of my tenure at Full Sail I'll be creating a Demo Reel to send out to prospective employers. Basically this is a compilation of short 8 to 10 seconds scenes that showcases the abilities I would like to do at a job somewhere. I've decided to specialize in animation. Hopefully this means that I'll get a job imbuing a character with life throuh movement (as opposed to a "modeller" who would create the character or a texture artist who would color to the character).

Now that I've made this decision, I've become interested in what other recent animation graduates have been putting out in the way of demo reels. Animation Mentor is an online animation school that gives certificates in "Advanced Studies in Character Animation". It was started by three fellas who worked on "Toy Story 2”, “Monster's Inc.”, “Finding Nemo”, “Star Wars” episodes I, II, and III, “Hulk”, The Incredibles”, and their students have been pumping out some really amazing animations.

Today I'm going to share with you their Fall 2007 Showcase - I assume the best of the best from their crop of students last year. An individual student's character animation demo reel will have about a minute and a half of short clips like these, and the ones shown here are at a high level of quality - definitely something for my to aspire to meet or exceed. Enjoy!

You can find an interview with the guys from Animation Mentor over at CGSociety.

Also - The guys over at Enliv have started posting on Monday AND Thursday. Which is awesome. So go check it out.

It's Harder than You'd Think (TWSS)

Well, I'm now making stuff in 3D. And here's my first ... thing.

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Hopefully, you can tell that it's a street lamp. If not... well... I suggest you go reexamine the nearest street lamp. That's the 'effin essence of street lamp.

For my 3D Foundations class my group and I will be making a 6 second animation with 5 characters, 10 props, and some sort of background scenery (you'll definitely be seeing it here on the blog). For our props, such as the above street lamp, we're limited to between 300 and 500 polygons. That street lamp has around 350, which helps to explain why it's a wee bit blocky.

Needless to say, I'm super excited. By the end of my Full Sail career, I'll be making a demo reel. This is essentially a couple minutes of my best work. Modeling, Texturing, Rigging, Animation, Lighting... everything. My street lamp has only been modeled. Here's an example of a Computer Animation demo reel I found on the ol' intertubes.

Pretty sweet right? Although that guy might want to spell check his credits (Grpoup Projects?). After watching a few of those things, I start dreaming of what I'll make. This early in the game, I can really can only make fairly simply objects. But even with my three dimensional possibilities limited, I tend to push the limits in my aspirations.

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I'm gonna have to put in a lot of effort and concentration to get as good as I'd like to be. Probably even more so than when I was playing the original TMNT video game (Audio NSFW).

But I think I'm up to the task.