Reel and Site Help

Professional
1

Hi everyone,

I’m not too sure if this is really the right spot to post this but I’ve been struggling on looking for a job as a tech artist and now I’m here reaching out for some help from people out in the industry.

I believe that my show reel and website are not helping me out and I am looking for some ways to improve. I am looking to see if anyone wouldn’t mind taking some time to look at my reel and site for some possible tips and to answer a few questions.

You can send me a private message here or email me at a_hostler@yahoo.com

Thanks for your time

2

give us a link to look at… can’t really give advice without something to look at. rather than pm’s, maybe having a discussion on this thread will reduce the amount of redundant advice you get.

3

agreed

4

Sorry, I thought I did. I guess that’s what I get for posting at 6 in the morning.

Here is the site www.andrewhostler.com

5

cool, i took a look real quick and your reel and site and thought i’d just give put up some of the thoughts i had real quick.

  • I think your body rig is pretty good, the character is somewhat original and the wing rig is pretty neat. space switching looks good, ik fk back is cool, and like i said the wing rig is neat. are the feather things driven by dynamics?

  • regarding the facial rig, i think you are on the right track, but the rig could use a little improvement. having local controls on the face as well as the “smiley face”, which also seems to display the local controls, is a little redundant. the slider setup looks cool. try to show something more interesting than a nose wiggle and a quick smile. while in the process of trying to demonstrate the rig, try creating a dynamic pose, show what kind of cool stuff you can make with the rig.

  • on your resume, in experience, list something you did in school, if you were part of a project or something. something applicable. it’s easy to see that you have no experience, and you can’t really hide that (nor should you), but as someone trying to break in, you want to show that you are capable of doing the work that will be asked of you. if you were part of a project, show what you did with quantifiable work (rigged x characters for a y minute long short, wrote z tools to manage pipeline, that kind of thing).

  • do you prefer film or games? i’m not really sure by looking at your reel / site whether you feel more passionately towards one or the other.

  • your resume says you are familiar with mel and mxs, it would be nice to know more about what kind of tools you have written. that stuff can be hard to show in a demo reel, but you can still try to establish your familiarity.

  • this is maybe nitpicky, but generally speaking, your website looks like it could use some love. i’ll be honest when i first went to it, i had low expectations of your reel. your reel is much better than your web site. i’m not saying you need to have a crazy flash site with tons of submenus and that crap, but the site is not a good indication of your ability, and that’s your first impression on people.

lastly, unfortunately for you, jobs are becoming harder to come by and you are competing with experienced people for jobs. be patient, i actually think you have somewhat of an advantage in the sense that you will be eager and not a stodgy veteran who refuses to change their ways. keep that in mind and be confident. don’t be afraid to relocate either, because most of us have gotten used to going wherever the work is (i’ve been in 3 cities in 3 years from one coast to the other, sadly).

good luck!

6

Thanks for taking a look at my work.

The wing rig that I created, all the feathers are dynamically controlled with hair curves. I also made them completely adjustable just incase if an animator needed to tweak anything.

On the facial rig, I was not too sure what would work out the best for an animator. All the ones I talked to liked having the idea and ability to control it in the way they preferred. I can change the facial rigs section to push more poses instead of just showing off the facial movement…

With my resume, there wasn’t really to much to get involved with at school. Towards the end of my stay there they started a TD club and I was in till I had to move. Through out my time at school I did worked on random projects for friends. Should I include that work on my resume?

With my site, I’m still trying to figure out how to make it more presentable. That’s why I came to the forums to see if I can get some input on that. Between both film and games, I would love to work on both. I am not really pushing for one or the other, but for both currently.

I would like to post some of the tools I have worked on but they aren’t really much. Just some simple command tools. I have been trying to get my friends to come up with anything that they would like to see as a tool or to help them with their work flow but right now I am coming up empty handed. If anyone has any suggestions on some tools I could try writing, that would be great.

I know my site does need some work and I’ve been trying to figure out what I can do with it. I do want it to be able to show off a lot of my work while still looking professional and easy to navigate.

Thanks again and I’ll start working on some of those changes to my reel.

7

Here’s my honest feedback:

The reel is pretty good for someone coming out of school but it’ll be tricky to go against someone in the industry, and I have a reel that was basically the same when I was graduating.

Website needs some serious loving, just download some templates you like and fill in the spaces.

Need to work on the compression of your reel 200 megs for a low res isnt very low res, try mp4 compressions or something that’ll compress videos into Ipod format, those usually do a decent job.

I’d say leave the multiple control schemes on the facial rig, because even though you probably wouldn’t do that in a real studio, it shows that you know how to do all 3.

One of the things that makes a rigger stand out nowadays is the ability to recreate a rig with a script. Try scripting your humanoid rig, most studios have a scripted rigging pipeline where you place the joints and press a button so showing that you are familiar with such a system and can add to/ modify is a big plus.

It is customary to show some drawings at the end of the reel just to show how well you can draw, if you can’t draw don’t put anything in there, but if you can it’s nice to see some figure studies or some musculature studies to show you know what’s going on underneath.

I’d crank the dynamics on those feathers WAY up, it looks cool but they barely move, usually I like to overcrank features just so it’s obvious that they’re working, even though in a final animation they would be toned down significantly.

Here’s my reel coming out of school… Lessons I learned : If you cant animate, don’t publicize it, noone cares about turnaraounds on a rigging reel, scripting is more impressive then moving controls around.

I got a job at EA with this, which was extremely lucky but I was told that what really got me in was the fact that I could script a rigging system. That being said I did shaders at EA since they already had a rigger.

The biggest feature people are looking for in TA’s is the self starting personality and the ability to learn quickly and solve problems fast. If you can convey that in a reel you’re golden.

Hope that helps, let me know if you have any questions,

Luiz

8

I took a look at some templates and I have a friend helping me figure out how to get them to work with my site. I’m working on getting some changes done to it now and I’m hoping to have it updated soon.

When I was graduating, they wanted our low reel as H.264 but I’ll compress it further.

This is perfect timing about scripting a rig. One of my friends tossed me a model which I can start working on right now. It shouldn’t take me too long to get that done except for some of the dynamics.

I can go through and crank the feathers up, I sent off my work for friends to mess with it for feed back as well as for some animations and that was what they sent me.

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I’m going through and working on some scripts to include in my next show reel along with one for my website. I also found someone who is going to help me with my site.

9

good luck!

as far as the tools goes, need for tools can become pretty apparent if you try using the rig. i’m not sure if you animate much, but generally as you animate you will come across things that will make you think ‘this could be much simpler.’ that’s a good opportunity to script something out, make workflow tools. you don’t need to write an exporter to prove that you know how to script (i couldn’t write an exporter if i had to, haha)