Overview

You will create a reel with 5–10 samples of your best work. Your reel is an important marketing tool that helps demonstrate your skills and abilities to a potential employer. The samples you choose need to show that you have a range of talents and broad experience in many areas.

Fill your reel with samples of work from your classes, your freelance work, and a few from your personal work.

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Grading checklist

• Your completed reel with at least 5–10 samples
• Use Premiere Pro or After Effects
• Design your own unique and consistent scene layout
• 60–90-seconds
• 16:9 ratio
• 30fps
• Use appropriate sound
• Render to a final .mp4

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Reel – Best Practices

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Storyboard your reel first

Sketches are fine first. This is where you begin to tell your story. Your intro should be unique, professional, memorable, and show a bit of your personality. Next, show examples of what type of projects you’ve worked on and who you’ve worked for. Show a variety of your skills and talents.

You can use my storyboard sheet below to get started. Or just grab a piece of paper and begin.

Sketched Storyboard

Here’s an example of my sketched storyboard

Digital Storyboard

After sketching, I move into Photoshop or Illustrator and do a full-resolution digital storyboard.

I set my artboard size (or just draw rectangles) to 1920 x 1080 and start designing my scene layout, look, style, and setting content.

This is where you will choose your color scheme and typefaces.

Set your brand assets

To maintain consistency throughout your reel, I’d recommend setting your logo, type, colors, and if possible your design layout before you begin designing your digital storyboard. Most of the time, though, it happens in real-time as you are designing your storyboard. Either way, set these assets and use them across all scenes to ensure the consistency of your visual message.

Here are my brand assets:

Final Reel

As you can see, I prefer a slower approach to presenting my work. I’m not a fan of too much zooming, flying, and abrupt transitions. Some examples shown below move very fast—too fast for my liking. It’s okay if you find your own speed somewhere in between.

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Reel examples

Here are several reel examples to inspire you and to help you learn what works and what doesn’t. I’ve added a few comments below to share how I feel about them.

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Now create your own reel

Once you’ve buffed out your storyboard and received some critique feedback, you’re ready to organize your files, colors, and typefaces and open Premiere Pro or After Effects to create your reel.

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Choose 5–10 pieces of Your Best Work

As you begin to gather samples for your reel, use the list of projects below to guide you.

1. Freelance projects for real clients (paid, volunteer, or internship)
2. Intro to Media Production:
   • Two-Person Conversation
   • Sequence
   • Final Production
3. Intro to Motion Graphics:
   • Interesting Statistic
   • Educational Animation
4. Foundations of Video Production:
   • RAVE PSA
   • Documentary
   • Final Project
5. Advanced Video Production:
   • Montage
   • Client Project(s)
   • Dramatic Encounter
   • Documentary
6. Compositing and Video Effects:
   • Live Production
   • Self-Driven Projects
   • Audio Production:
7. · ADR
   • Audio Book
   • Loops
8. Digital Photography
   • Tourism
   • Portraits
   • Final?
9. Graphic Design Classes:
   • Infographic
   • Map
   • Media Cover
   • Logo Design
   • Animated Video
   • Photoshop project
   • Illustrator project
   • Digital illustrations or drawings