VFX & animation showreel storyboarding, session 1 (three hours)

What is a showreel?

For the visual effects and animation industry, a showreel these days is in my opinion very much like a CV, or at least an important extension of it. To further increase my understanding of what a showreel means to successful studios today, I did a little research.

Google returned an About.com article with a nice list of visual effects demo reels to take a look at:
http://3d.about.com/od/Computer-Animation/tp/20-Mindblowing-Studio-Showreels.htm

A few ideas popped into my head from watching these.
The standard three to four minute length of these showreel examples seems a little long for me somehow. I'm not sure what exactly bores me. The content changes very quickly, and I am left with a feeling that I can't focus on anything before it's gone.

I'm thinking could the showreel be shorter than this, maybe two minutes in length but at the same time be more coherent rather than just a random mix of video flashing by the viewer's eyes.
How can I differentiate my work from every other showreel already out there?

Story-wise, things to consider from what I saw was timing, consistency and tact. My showreel should be well structured and convey a simple, effective story.

How can I amaze the audience visually on the showreel? This question is probably the most important in the making of a showreel. I want a feeling that sticks. I'm thinking variety should be evident like in a traditional showreel to keep the interest and communicate that I am capable of working with multiple styles.

Technological expertise should come across with appropriate titles when the focus shifts from, say, animation to visual effects. The software might be good to point out as well.

Finally I figured it would be important to grab from these examples some clues of what is on demand of the industry these days. There seems to be a repeating pattern of particle effects and motion tracking in visual effects showreels. These tasks are both resource intensive and difficult at times so it makes sense to have them in a showcase. Mechanical transformations seemed to be also popular a theme within the selected works. So ideally all these would have to be included into my showreel to make it convincing, right?

Anyway, I'm still behind my set schedule. I will have to ramp up my daily hours next week to catch up. Let's see how it goes.

Task list

I thought it might be a good idea to post this list of tasks here to keep me more oriented. This week I have been too busy with a VFX project to work on anything else, so I have to do my remaining nine hours (one hour session used for CV assessment) during the weekend. To ease into it, I start with doing research for the showreel storyboarding task. Anyway, here is the task list in its entirety:

Given tasks:

- Job application letter and CV (17 hours)

- Essay, source material of at least two articles (17 hours)

- Presentation on a company or project (17 hours)

- Learning blog (17 hours)

Freely chosen tasks:

- Game design document for a point-and-click adventure game (17 hours)

Learning goals: Obtaining information from sources and doing analysis of existing games of this genre. Increasing professional vocabulary. Being able to produce well-written text that sells an idea.

- Showreel script (or rather a video storyboard with commentary) (17 hours)

Learning goals: Writing for screen. Increasing professional vocabulary. Doing research towards being able to produce a high quality video with understandable structure. Increasing skills in spoken English production.

- A webcomic based on the adventure game plot draft (17 hours)

Learning goals: Doing research on how to produce a comic with good narration and structure. Increasing professional vocabulary.

- Interview with a web designer (17 hours)

Learning goals: Increasing professional vocabulary by creating the questions and by writing a transcription of the interview. Improving skills in spoken interaction.

Plan approved & working on CV

So my learning plan got approved and we agreed that it should not be too much of an issue to switch some of the hours here and there, if required.

So I started to work on the first task which was the CV. I used my old CV (from January 2014) as a base to create the one in English. You can find the Finnish version here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B15EEo-p7NLfMjVJdFdMNklDRlE/edit?usp=sharing

This CV is actually not too great when evaluating it with the tips list for a good CV on the course's Tabula page. The photo might be unnecessary, the titling is missing a profession and the key skills are last on the layout. However, there are some good parts as well. I think the layout is understandable and the typeface is simple and big enough to be legible.

I am currently working on the draft version of the new CV. I think I'm closer to the "good CV" example given in Tabula. There is a fine line between these two however; the layout is very similar and the typeface is not that different.

First post & plan draft

In this blog I will write about my daily handling of the tasks and how I felt about the sessions.

Here is the first draft of my learning plan: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YIrpr6aZKqpyyeYE8H1cZh_9B9IM2zhdZVdjq87Rprc/edit?usp=sharing
The plan includes goals and time-management descriptions for my eight tasks to be done for the TAMK English Language and Communication course. I think this first draft might work, since the tasks I chose myself include all the necessary learning goals. The time-management might prove a bit challenging with tasks of this scale. However, I am prepared to change the schedules if needed.