In the industry I am hoping to be involved with professionally, that of Visual Effects, you don't apply for jobs in the standard fashion, where you send in a simple Word doc that lists your past places of employment. Though you still do that, it's less a list of places and more a list of achievements, skills, and software. And hopefully a little bit of name-dropping. My friend Cameron can name-drop a hell of a lot of cool movie names and Directors on his resumé.
But what you also must add is what's known as a Showreel, or a Demo Reel, which is a series of video clips and sequences that show off examples of your actual achievements. And before I can show up at an interview for an Effects job, I need to put one of those together first.
Until recently, I have not had a lot of stuff to show, unfortunately. Most of what I have done in the past has been small potatoes, and not especially amazing. They show some amount of competence, but not really anything dazzling. So for the last two years, while working on more original and spectacular films, I have managed to slowly accrue quite a few examples of more applicable Visual Effects work.
At first I thought I didn't have much to show, but then as I was looking back on what I had handed in recently, it started to dawn on me just how much I had actually completed and was viewable. And when I assembled them together, I was surprised at how much variety there was, and, dare I say it, how good some of it looked.
So I have assembled them into my Showreel, and I am probably not too far away from starting to put it out there for the Studios to look at, should an opportunity arise. Or maybe I'll just push it towards them all without a request required.
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