Advice re DIY showreel please?

[fartoomuchtodo]

Trying to make my DS a showreel and we're DIY to keep costs down. Any advice please in respect of length, content and best video format? Should we by putting it on Vimeo/Youtube? We will be sending to his agent and I imagine they'll give us some advice but any help for you lovely lot would be much appreciated

[SNN]

If you do use something like YouTube or Vimeo, Vimeo would be better as it's more professional
Hope that helps

[pg]

It might help you to look at other actors' showreels to get an idea of length and format. Casting Call Pro is quite a good site to look at - the "featured profiles" change every time you refresh the page and quite a lot of the actors have showreels on their pages. Alternatively you could look at showreel providers' websites as they often have examples of showreels they have put together.

Advice I have had from Casting Directors includes:

Keep it short. An abolute maximum of 5 minutes - but 3 minutes or less would be much better. CD's often only watch 30 seconds.
Don't bother with a montage - or if you really want to include it, put it at the end.
Start with your very best acting scene.
Don't worry about "context". The scenes don't have to make dramatic sense for them to be effective in a showreel.
If you are using clips from short films etc then make sure it is clear who you are meant to be watching. I have seen showreels where it has taken me more than a minute to work out which actor the showreel is supposed to be showcasing.
Try to ensure that all clips have decent lighting/clarity and ensure that sound is consistent so that the watcher doesn't have to adjust volume during the reel.

Content: obviously the best content for a showreel is a series of high quality broadcast clips from identifiable programmes or films. This is often not possible, especially when starting out. If you are choosing material to include in a showreel that you or someone else will be filming: make sure it is in the actor's casting bracket, include duologue/reaction scenes wherever possible, only include something in an accent if it could be mistaken for a native accent. Keep it simple and modern - period stuff is hard to pull off without a budget. Remember that screen work is often about reaction (showing, not telling) so don't be afraid of screen time with no words. Don't bother with fancy cutaways or beautiful scenery or any scene setting - these might be needed for the narrative of a film, but they are rarely essential in a showreel and take up time you could be using to show some acting.

[fartoomuchtodo]

Thanks all - especially pg - so much help and knowledge on this forum.

[pg]

A Casting Director friend alerted me to this today - don't know whether you've seen it, I think it has some useful information in it:

http://www.spotlight.com/news/archive/2 ... ellip.aspx

[francescasmum]

Thanks for posting the link pg, very interesting.

[fartoomuchtodo]

Thanks for the link pg - very helpful.

[paulears]

DIY video isn't too hard to do now - but the really, really critical bit is sound! For actors, good quality, high fidelity sound is essential. The camera audio is frequently not good enough, and gives a thin weedy and often reverberation filled sound. Rooms with hard walls and floor, and distant camera (and mic) placement sound exactly like what they are - boxy poor sounding spaces. Proper microphones make a huge difference. Oddly, many amateur video people just don't think about sound. Find somebody local who has the right kit. I've heard too many bad ones. People don't seem to notice the pictures being a little iffy, if the sound is clear.

[fartoomuchtodo]

We are very lucky in that our DS has (just) enough TV stuff to make a showreel. He's done 3 Tv shows and a voice over so some bits of those cut together should hopefully work OK. Might post a link to it on here for critique when we're done! But you're asolutely right about sound paulears. When we do self tapes our 'ordinary' camera gives fine video but the sound is awful, we borrow a proper video camera form my OHs work.