Faking it
Having re-organised my showreel, it’s clear there are a couple of gaps – areas in which the work I’ve done so far either isn’t stuff I can or want to show off, or just isn’t varied enough to appeal to the markets I know are out there…

The most obvious of these is web banners and intros. Video on the web has only really exploded into everyday sites in the past couple of years, and it’s only now people are starting to get the idea they can create intro screens and banners with content as rich as you’d get on TV – that means I’ve only done a couple of such projects (all in the last few months, which I guess is the point).

So I spent Friday faking work – producing a whole showreel of banners and intros… based on fictitious companies and made-up products.

See if you can work out which in this showreel are real and which are created for the showreel….

It’s not really a cheat – there’s no difference between a piece of work done to show off what you can do and one done for an actual commission except that commissions often don’t let you show off your skills to the same extent, so I don’t feel I’m making any false claims by introducing these elements – a showreel is just there to show what you can produce…

In the same spirit, I decided my main showreel was a bit limited in the area of combining video and shot footage, so I added a couple of “pop video” clips just to show I can work with people as well as cg sharks!

One I did in a very clean graphical style, the other, I gave a much more grungy treatment.



I think what people find hard to grasp when looking at showreels is that ANYTHING is now possible with CG. The problem is that unless you know your way around the software, you can’t really say what’s very easy and what will add weeks of design time to a project, and that’s probably where clients find it hard to work out what they can afford to do.

Maybe I should produce an effects crib-sheet for commissioning clients to let people know what’s easy and what’s hard…

Maybe when I’ve got a minute….

Wall Street Crash
… which right now I haven’t – primarily because at about 5:30 on Friday, the company I created a series of Mexican wrestlers for a month or so ago contacted me with another commission.

As before, the deadline was Wednesday (remember, Saturday and Sunday are the weekend, Monday was a bank holiday and Tuesday I’m looking after George)... and as before, the company are operating out of blackberries – so all communication for this complex project has to come in the form of ambiguous text messages.

What it turns out they want is a video clip to look like a videogame for a proposed Wall Street trading game. I have to fill an empty trading room with CG traders all standing around chatting, and place a player character in among them….

It’s not an easy job to animate a whole crowd of people in a couple of days.

I think I’ve nailed it now, but I did have to do some work over the weekend, and getting it done for the deadline was very tight… I was working until half ten last night.

I usually have a strict rule about weekends and evenings, but with this, it was either accept a little overtime, or not take the job on….

It looks like with the success of my advertising campaign, turning down work is something I’m going to have to get used to doing… it just never seems to be the right time to do it, but I’m going to have to find a way if I’m ever to get back to my documentaries!