Animation Demoreel critique
triangle
Hello! So, I am a recently graduated student and I would like to hear your opinion about my demoreel, what shots would you change/remove etc. Don´t be afraid of be hard, I can take it! Thank you very much for your time!!
Replies
By switching from character to character between shots you increase the amount of time I need to adjust to each shot. It may not be as exciting but if you group all of the shots of each character together it may read better.
Another approach would be to include lead-up time before the very short shots and make that lead up time black and white if you didn't work on it. That's a common visual language I've seen on demo reels of it's important to the pacing.
Anything you can do to help smooth out the flow will let us see your animation better. I don't focus on cinematics much so I'd be interested to hear what other techniques people would use.
I made the cuts this fast so it wouldn´t bore the spectator, but if it is confusing I must change it! Also, I am a bit confused by your mention about the lead-up time; what do you mean exactly, to leave some frames before the animation starts?
If you check out this demo reel at 1:31 you'll see a shot in black and white which says "NOT MINE" at the bottom. They included that shot because their shot was the next one, but it wouldn't flow or make sense without this shot before it. That's just one technique you can use if you worked on a project where you didn't do all the animation. Another option is just to leave a few frames of black in between shots if they have conflicting motion that would be confusing (ex. it would be confusing to cut from one shot where a character moving fast to the left to another shot where a character is moving fast to the right). In the end, if the overall experience isn't readable, it doesn't matter how good the animation is, and the point of your demo reel is to show off your animation. If you can also show off editing and whatnot that's great, but don't let it get in the way of your animation.
The 3 shots after the woman running is the most confusing section for me. There are tilted camera angles, fast action and non-standard character doing crazy motions. Any of those are fine because they are a part of the shot, I just need time to process it.
For the Broccoli running, If you don't NEED to have the character from multiple angle, that I'd reduce it to a single 3/4 view. This goes for the other shots with multiple angles as well.
For the shot with the blue background, was there a shot before this which you can include (in black and white) so that we can get used to looking at the character before they do this big action?
As for the wireframe, personally I'm not a fan and would almost always rather see just a basic shaded playblast/render. Wireframe isn't representative of the final product and usually just serves to add visual noise which gets in the way of the animation for me.
I'd cut or revisit the woman walking at 0:20. The legs are poppy and it doesn't hold up to the quality of some of your other shots.
I'm looking forward to seeing an updated version if you decide to change anything,
Thank you very much again for the feedback, I hope you have a great week!
-It looks like a lot of the characters have sliding feet in the first shot
-the way those first 3 shots are cut together feels a little odd to me, like it doesn't quite flow from shot to shot the way it does in TV shows or movies
- the pink girl has an odd hitch in her torso as she's running
- the chair at :17 needs some love, currently it doesn't feel grounded
-I don't think the stompy walk is your best work, I would omit or fix that one, currently it feels very poppy
-broccoli needs textures
-00:26-00:30 this section feels very confusing, and the lack of textures are not helping you. Right now I'm not really sure what's happening. Vegetable on a roller coaster I think?
-31-49 is some of your stronger work I think
-the last shot has a lot of weird pops and wall smacks, I would omit or revisit that one also
-put your best work first and last
Also, Despite what people say, rendering DOES make a big difference. Obviously you still need to have solid animation though. Good luck!
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/0f5d6ce2ac8e/#542763
And yes, vegetables on a roller coaster hahaah they are from a game I participated in, and the lore was a bit crazy.
For the broccoli run cycle, was there a reason you specifically chose a 4 frame cycle? I understand that stylistically it should look very fast, but without motion blur I don't think 4 frames is giving you the best result. Maybe the poses should be slightly different, or maybe you need more frames, I'm not sure. I don't have much experience with cartoonishly fast animation like this, so hopefully somebody else can chime in with better advice about how to solve the issue.
Before I spend time critiquing the specific animations, are you able to revisit the shots from the first half of the reel? I know sometimes with group school projects it's not as easy to go back and touch things up.
About the broccoli run,it is the way we imported them into unreal, we wanted to achieve a really fast animation and as unreal works with seconds and not with frames (or that is what I understood in the moment) the better way to do it was animating it at 60 fps. Maybe at the moment of rendering the whole reel I have lost the effect, but honestly I don´t know how to do it in any other way
And the animation that you mentioned that "pops", it is supposed to be a loop of an animation that finishes with the character looking to the other way, so when the animation ends, it loops back to the first position.
Some of them I am able to change but I don´t know if I will be able to achieve the same render quality. But if you leave me some feedback I will try to re-render and correct the animations, that is for sure