Online Portfolio and Reel

Rwolf

Hey let me know what you guys think! I'm starting look for a job in Edmonton and Vancouver next week, and hope my website is up to snuff.

www.trevortang.net

Reel Low 17 megs High 32 megs

bearkub

Very nice clean site. Almost TOO clean on the front page. ;] Opinions will vary, of course, but I think you should have at least one of your pieces on the front page to attract would-be employers or interest. The big gray area with just a tiny bit of text makes the page look empty and blank.

Also, you need to make the things that are clickable look that way. I would have never bothered to click your resume as an employer since it just looked like you were telling me your resume was in .doc format, from the way it was presented.

Very clean design, just needs something to draw people to it. Good stuff dude and good luck on a gig!!

MAUL0r

trying to play your demoreel crashes firefox for me... no job for you!

I like the page layout, although at my current resolution of 1024x768 at work, I have to do a lot of scrolling to see your whole images. This can take away from any composition choices you've made.

Uly

Quick note. Firefox Crashing .mov's whether they're embedded or playing from source happens often. I'd recommend offering a quality alternative such as a low compression flash movie.

I've had Firefox crash on multiple occasions when trying to view people's Quicktime demo reels, but larger sites seem to work fine. Does anybody have any HTML or tips on this matter?

And cool stuff, good luck on your job hunt!

MoP

Pretty cool stuff on there.
Major note: Don't have a "news" page as your main page. Regardless of what you may think, nobody really cares about news, unless they're reading an actual current affairs page. If they're on your website, they want to see the art, so make the art page the first page that appears when you type the website address.
You could leave the news page as a separate link, but personally I'd just remove it.

You have some nice models there, good luck!

Rwolf

Thanks for the tips!

As for the reel. Quicktime with h.264 was the only way I found to get my reel a tiny size without killing detail. I planned on have AVI's avaliable but couldn't figure out a good widespread codec that would do the same with the quicktime. Any thoughts on that?

Uly

AVIs are, IMHO, shit for a portfolio. They stream & buffer terribly, and don't have a codec on par with H.264.

There are *excellent* codecs for it, but the mainstream makes a considerable effort to keep them from becoming widespread, such as DivX or Xvid. (Mostly due to piracy issues.) Besides those two niches, I don't know anything better than the standard shitty compression.

Flash can get you decent quality, but it's nowhere near H.264. In the end, you have to make a call on whether or not you think your visitors and potential employers will be able to see past iffy compression.

East

I cringe every time I have to look through a reel in the AVI container. I can't scrub through it frame by frame easily, which is something I love with the MOV container. If I want to watch a turntable of a model over and over again, I just scrub back and forth at my own speed. Never works with AVI or WMV.

So.. please, for the sake of my sanity. Always have a MOV alternative