What should an ideal senior animator showreel consist of?

deohboeh

What should an ideal senior animator's showreel consist of? What will people be looking for?
What skills do you suggest I learn?

ZacD

The easiest way to know what skills they are looking for is to look at job postings, and looking at senior animators portfolios online.

http://www.riotgames.com/careers/senior-character-animator
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=140002P

http://animatorsteve.weebly.com/

deohboeh

Thanks for the reply Zac! I have seen some animation showreels but how do you spot an amateur or junior animator showreel vs a senior more experienced animator? Like in modelling one may look at the form the fidelity the texturing, style, anatomy.

ZacD

I'm not an animator, but...

Mostly people just judge the quality of animation, the basic things are the 12 principals of animation:

1. Squash and stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight ahead action and pose to pose
5. Follow through and overlapping action
6. Slow in and slow out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid drawing
12. Appeal

All of these are explained on wikipedia, and these are a bit geared to classical 2d animation, but a lot of it carries over. Even if you use some mocap, the imporant things are, Does it read well? Does it look fluid? Does it have the right weight to it? Is it realistic (where relevant)?

Controls for video games need to feel solid and snappy, so that's traits are often preferred over smooth and slow. Sometimes you can only have a few frames of anticipation. But then there's titles like Dark Souls where it's deliberately slow. Just make sure the your portfolio animations "match the game" situation you are presenting.