Monday 21 October 2013

Squeezing All The Goodness In

It's been many moons since I last updated my showreel, being distracted by the very employment it led to. Deep, eh?
I may have also been distracted by Breaking Bad a little bit. And, far more alarmingly, Catfish. But I'm all out of episodes for both, so unless I overcome my violent aversion to the voice of the narrator and fall into a destructive spiral of Come Dine With Me reruns, my time has freed up a bit.
The last few years I've updated the same reel by swapping old, ropey footage for new, swanky footage, keeping the main structure intact. Having been assured by many previous and prospective employers alike that it was overlong by at least a minute, this time around I redid the entire reel from scratch to get a concentrated 90 seconds of my absolute favourite shots:
Consequently I had to be pretty ruthless, and a lot of the earlier films of mine - House Guest, Ground Running, The Naughty List and my ode to Opie & Anthony Chicken Chokes You - have been whittled down to a few seconds of footage each - ol' zombie duck barely gets a look-in nowadays. After a hideous commission that started the year off (represented above only with a fleeting, modified shot of a cat running - nothing else from that doomed project need ever see the light of day) I've had a pretty good year of short commercial projects as well as the ongoing HuHa webisodes which, coupled with my love affair with Toon Boom, have been a great shot in the arm and give the reel a lot more stylistic range. Other projects thrown in the mix include work for Channel 4, Slurpy Studios, Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg and New Impulse Media. I'm still holding back on the Bullies footage as, even though it's all animated and awaiting a distribution plan of action, for the time being I want to keep it under wraps until the final version's been seen in full at least a couple of times. Some HuHa clips represent the same animation style so it'd be somewhat superfluous anyway.
I also wrote the music specifically for the reel, I wanted something quite punchy with a simple enough 4/4 to make effectively editing the clips a bit easier. At the moment the piece is merely titled "Hire Me Already" and features some nods to a certain band I may have professed to admiring once or twice.
For no other reason than I have a YouTube channel, it's also up on my YouTube channel. So if, for whatever reason, your machine or device or doodad doesn't like Vimeo you can watch it there instead:

No comments: