Demo Reel: Animation

Scott Ruggels

I got a bit of a shock when My supervisor strongly encouraged me away from modeling and towards animation. As a result, I am applying for animation rather than generalist jobs any more. (Basically I am uneven with high polygon models, and a poor texture painter.) So without furhter ado, my Demo reel.

75Meg DivX encoded (please be considerate of bandwidth, and not load unless you are serious)

Feel free to leave comments but It's past the time to be able to change things.

Scott

Lee3dee

Hey Scott, here's my thoughts

Your title is 10 seconds long, I think 5 seconds would be better, the font is huge! A simple "Animation Reel, scott Ruggels, cell number, email.

The ingame stuff is great, but you need a caption on the bottom or somewhere saying what game its from, because I didn't know. Who was responsible for the environments, give some credit to others.

Not a fan of the titles, like locomotion, id rather you faded into the various animations.

The animations look great, you could lessen the time taken to show side, and front views with a simple 3 quarter perspective. Also, some simple text displaying maybe (walk, attack1, die, etc.)

The total lenght of the demo reel is 4:37. You need to shave it down to 2min and under. Its so long and drawn out, i started to click at random to see other pieces. Take a look at Jim Jagger's demo reel for an idea for animation reel. http://www.jimjagger.com/JAssets/JMovies/2005DemoReel.mov for some ideas on cutting it down.

You definately have the experience needed, just need to shave those minutes off the reel.

Scott Ruggels

You're right about the tie, but there wasn't a lot I coudl do about it, as the "front / side was something insisted on by my supervisors as showing the cycles and "hiding" nothing. As to attributions, that was something the recruiter said to put on a separate http://www.rdwarf.com/users/edbado/DemoReel/Shot%20List12-20-05.rtf shot list, so as not to confuse them with text on the screen and the motion. The font is huge, because there will probably be a 320 x 240 version of the reel to conserve bandwidth on the private Web Provider.

Scott

aesir

I'd say it was a bit on the long side too.

As far as the side and front views you showed, how about a camera that rotated around the character as it went through the run/walk cycle.

I'd also suggest you trim down all but the best animations when youre showing an entire set. It gets repetetive after a while and your reel is already quite long as it is.

Lastly, some walk and run cycles by human characters would be really important to add in my opinion.


Overall I'd say it was pretty good, but some fine tuning couldnt hurt.

Scott Ruggels

I did trim.

However the idea of the rotating camera is good, though it does touch on my phobia of gimicky CG Camera moves. Good. Hmmm though re-rendering is a bitch...

Scott

Rick Stirling

Maybe you did this before, but render it out as images instead of video, then recompile into a video.

This way if you need to make changes to one part you don't need to re-render the rest.

Scott Ruggels

Yes, they were all rendered as TARGAs so thatI could replace individual bad renders, but the problem was that with long sequences over say.. 1000 frames, Premier became unstable, Also renders were slow. :-(.

Scott