Animation Reel critique please!

Rod. FAULK

Ive been having a tough time finding work as an animator, kinda been messing with my confidence lately. Do you think im ready for employment, or is my work below average?

I thought employers would find my understanding with modern game engines and animations useful. Please give me the cold hard truth!

https://youtu.be/xEAAAhCkOO8

Ichi

Hey, I think you commented on my Youtube channel recently asking for advice (small world!) so I'll just put it on here instead.

I think if I was a recruiter at a large studio, my biggest issue would be that the reel isn't specialised enough. 3D animation is a highly specialised field, so if you want to market yourself as an animator, then only show animation in your reel. I think it's useful that you know the workflow for games engines, but it would be much better to have that information on the screen whilst animations were playing. I think the first 8 seconds of your reel looks great, but there's no real volume of animation work after that. Check out these animation reels and look at how much time is dedicated to actually watching the animation above anything else:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hldCtjT9baI

Secondly, some of the animations in the reel look a little unpolished. There's a bit of IK snapping here and there and a lot of them could use another pass just to clean them up a bit. Don't use dynamic foot placement or anything that will interfere with the quality of your animation, a clean playblast from Maya/3dsmax would go much further than a jerky rendition from a games engine.

LloydHallam

As an animator. When you're first trying to break into the industry, your demo reel should consist of no more than a minute at most of your absolute BEST animation. Like Ichi said, your reel is a bit all over the place at the moment. Aside from it generally being too long, you have these really long drawn out shots were the frame rate is really low for a single animation of a guy standing up from a crouching position.

While it's good that you have a decent amount of knowledge of the engine, that's not what you're applying for, you're applying to be an animator, so your reel needs to reflect that better. Having some cinematic stuff in your demo reel is nice, but it's not necessary, recruiters are looking for the quality of your animation, and it's hard to do that if the camera's all over the place.



This is demo reel that first got me hired. It's a minute and a half, which is still a bit too long honestly, but it consists of nothing more than playblasts of my best animation work (at the time) on some grey backgrounds. It's as simple as that.

Rod. FAULK

Thank you all for the feedback! I will use this week to clean up my reel and will check back in this friday