Reel Time, Real Talk

Speaker 0 00:00:01 Hi, I'm Aaron Swarovski Speaker 1 00:00:03 And I'm Austin to Shaw. Speaker 0 00:00:05 This is between the key frames, Real time, real talk. Speaker 1 00:00:14 Boom. Speaker 0 00:00:15 I've been really looking forward to real-time real talk. It's an opportunity for us to kind of put into practice all the shit we talk about and are going to cover and professional practices. And this is going to relate to you whether you're junior or putting together your first real, I think, or whether you're a professional that's been working forever and has all of this amazing work and what to do with it. You know what I mean? So I'm excited. Speaker 1 00:00:43 Cool, cool. Um, so the demo reel, and specifically today, we're going to talk about the montage and I think it's just important to, to frame that and kind of define what's a demo reel, what's a montage. I always think about the demo reel as the container of your motion work is your portfolio. And, and often I have students ask if they have to make a montage and I'm like, look, you don't have to do anything. You know, it's, it's really, there are not, there are no rules, it just has to work. So your, your demo reel, it can be a montage, you know, back in the day, it was a bit different. Cause with, with websites, we have a lot more flexibility, but back in the day we had like VHS tapes and DVDs and things like that and CBS. Um, so it was a really kind of important to kind of curate and have a real linear flow with. Speaker 1 00:01:38 You could be a lot more nonlinear with a website with Vimeo, with Instagram, but anyway, you don't have to make a montage. I do like montages and I'm going to read a quick definition for that. Uh, I like words, I like definitions. So montage, all right. The process or technique of selecting, editing and piecing together separate sections of film to form a continuous whole. So, you know, tradition really from, from film, this idea of putting together, um, various pieces of your pieces of different projects or shots from projects to make a new hole. The reason I liked the montage as part of a demo reel is that it showcases your range of work. What you're good at what you're interested in, in a really short amount of time. Right? So it's, it's just like this, this kind of a quick snapshot of, okay, cool. What you got, what are your skills? Speaker 1 00:02:32 And the other thing I always say to students about the montage is you want to, you don't need to show everything you've ever done. And in fact, it's like, yeah, less is more right. Shorter, just the best, the best of the best. Um, I mean, with any portfolio, with any curation, you're always going to get kind of knocked down to the weakest piece. Um, and, and it also created some doubt and uncertainty and whoever's reviewing it. If you've got a bunch of awesome work and all of a sudden there's some like not so good work in there. They're, they're going to question your taste. Like, why is that there? Right. Speaker 0 00:03:09 Totally agree. That happens all the time on a daily, well, when we review rails, but like when we look at a reel and there's like a couple pieces that really stand out as not being at the level of the rest of the work, you wonder, does this person know that this work is not as good? Is there? Speaker 1 00:03:28 Yeah. So this is definitely like an exercise in less is more, as long as that less is, is really good, the best of your best and what you like. And I'm going to tell a real quick story about the first time I kind of got introduced to this montage in the motion design context. This is back in, I don't know, early two thousands. I was interning at a studio called curious pictures. My, my head, my supervisor, uh, Wong, super talented, creative and producer. And she was reviewing demo reels. She was looking at them on VHS tapes. She was popping them in. Yeah. And I asked her, I said, what, so what are you looking at? What makes a good demo reel? Cause I'm thinking ahead, I'm an intern. I got to make one of these things at some point. And she told me that they had about 10 seconds to capture her attention, to make the hook her and make her want to keep watching that reel. Or she was just going to hit a Jack and throw it in the trash. And then the next reel in it's amazing. Cause that's like almost 20 years ago and that same Axiom of capture attention quickly is, is the same. If anything, we probably have less time. I always tell the students five to 10 seconds to really hook somebody capture their attention, which means you really want to front reload. The real, the montage with something that you think is your best work Speaker 0 00:04:53 First. Yeah. Yeah. It also means that, you know, typically you put your name or some kind of something at the beginning of the real, just the type setting alone could disqualify you. Speaker 1 00:05:05 Yeah. And also, you know, that doesn't, I mean, I always I'm, I don't usually actually do that. I know some students do and some professionals do, obviously if you're going to do it, make it awesome. Right. Make it awesome. And it doesn't have to be super Speaker 0 00:05:19 Yes Speaker 1 00:05:20 Or simple. Cause sometimes it's do come coming. There'll be like five, six seconds and it's just their name and it's kind of like, it's not doing anything and I'm like, you've already burned up your time to capture my attention. So yeah. Yeah. And then think, you know, a couple of other, just kind of broad stroke, 15 to 30 seconds, if you're is your first montage. Totally cool. As long as it's strong, everything is strong with, you know, the sort of the seniors, uh, the students who are or motion design students. I would usually tell them 30 seconds to a minute, but it's better 30 seconds. That's tight. Yeah. Yeah. But it just talking about students that were studying this for four years, so they have a little bit more robust work Speaker 0 00:06:05 And then argue about that. Cause like cool. As a student, your work every year or quarter to quarter or semester to semester, however it works for you is going to be so much better than the work before it that if you're a senior and you have sophomore stuff on your reel, you're not showing the skills to edit out unless you're some kind of savant as a sophomore that you're, you know, paying for education you don't need. You know? So I would say like from a student real like even, or montage, I would exp I would say it could be even shorter, 15 seconds, 30 seconds max, for me, because you're just showing me like, uh, what the potential is. You're not showing me all of this amazing body of work that you've been working, you know, for five or 10 years, if you've been working five or 10 years, maybe 45 seconds a minute, but I would be cool with 30 amazing seconds, like Speaker 1 00:07:07 Right. As long as each second is amazing. Speaker 0 00:07:12 Right. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:07:14 And, and the other thing, and the other, uh, kind of principle I like to talk about with the students is that what we're trying to do with this montage is to make, capture the attention and, and to kind of generate like a metaphorical thirst or hunger to see, right. It's the sample is just a sweet sample, short and sweet. So Speaker 1 00:07:39 Let's dive in, we got some submissions today. We're going to take a look at, and we're going to do something that I do with students, which is take a demo reel right into after effects and just do some, some editing and reshuffling and seeing if we can make it a little tighter. So we got a submission from John McKinney and John writes, this is my first motion design reel. I'm new to motion design and animation. And I'm chomping at the bit to make a new reel by the end of the year. So anything I can learn from you would be immensely appreciated. So cool. Cool. So let's, Speaker 0 00:08:14 Let's play the real Speaker 1 00:08:45 And we're going to let it loop for a second, get some first thoughts here. Speaker 0 00:08:49 First thoughts are I like the audio, right. Like his note does, I could tell it as a, a more junior real, but, um, but I appreciate the work that's in it. And it does make me want to go and look at a few pieces in the portfolio. Um, I'd say there's enough type to keep me interested as like a person that looks for that, but it also feels appropriate for what the kind of work that's being done. This is a nice collage piece there, of course, illustrated animation, which is a big, significant part portion of what all of us are doing. Now. He even has some treated footage in there, a little character animation type biography. So I would say this is a pretty well rounded. Yeah. Speaker 1 00:09:35 Especially for a first, for first, uh, first monetize. Yeah. And I was going to say, just to speak to what you talked about with type that's, something I'm always looking at when students show me their, their reels, I'm looking for examples of strong typography, whether it's the type setting and type in motion, because that's an employable skill. Every commercial project has some type. It might just be the super at the end, or it could be a whole time-driven piece. So if you can show that you can work with type that's, that's a bonus. If you want to get a job. Right. And if it live is missing, if all, if I don't see it or I don't see enough, it's usually, Hey, why don't you lay out some nice type treatments or work with some T logo types and animate them and let's put some shots in there. So, cool. Speaker 0 00:10:26 Totally agree about that. All right. Speaker 1 00:10:28 Let's go back to the real, so one of the things I like to do, we're going to duplicate this. We're going to turn on the audio on one track, turn off the video, and then we're going to just start breaking this into shots, and then we're going to do some reshuffling reordering. This is an interesting piece. I don't think I would lead with it because it, to me, it's almost, I'm like, oh, this is a kind of a cool collage artist, maybe. Speaker 0 00:10:56 Right? Speaker 1 00:10:58 Yeah. And it, and it, it would tell me almost, I don't know. It doesn't, um, I don't think it's the strongest shot in the real, Speaker 0 00:11:05 It's not as strong, not as strong as everything else. And I would say to your point of opening strong, what you see at the end of the reel is the strongest thing on there. Speaker 1 00:11:16 Okay. So we're gonna, we're gonna chop some of these, I'm a little hockey here. Command shift D is going to split the layer wherever my time indicator is. All right. So yes. I, I, I agree. I think not only because I like skin or graphy is just a nice, it's a very nice shot, high contrast. It's grabs my attention. It's nice movement. It's cinematic. It's very soon of graphic. Yeah. So we're going to go Speaker 0 00:11:43 Organic thing going for it. That is great. Speaker 1 00:11:47 Totally. So we're going to, we're going to slide that up. I'm going to slide these over for now and we're going to play this down and see how it feels Speaker 1 00:12:06 So it feels good. It's probably hanging a little long, right? And there's a nice audio cue. I'm going to try to hit this kind of drum. I'm going to use it a layer. Marker. Let's see if I got it pretty close. Let's trim it option. Right? Right. Bracket, trims, everything to the right. Maybe a couple frames later. So that feels pretty good. And then we're going to think about, what do we want to go second? We got all our options here. I actually like this shot, this wave shot. It's pretty fun. I love that shot. It's good footage. It feels like it's got a collage moment. It's got more type. It's got the old film treatment. So let's slide that up. Slide these guys back. Speaker 0 00:12:58 I love seeing heavily treated footage in a montage or in a motion designers work Speaker 1 00:13:05 Or just in life. Speaker 0 00:13:08 Your great Speaker 0 00:13:14 Oh, a lot of the times we're asked like, Hey, go get some stock and make it cool. Right. And it's like, okay, well, this would be a cool thing to do with some SOC, Speaker 1 00:13:24 Because like, you're right. There's so many, I mean, color, grading, color, correction, color, grading, stylizing, so many skills. And to know that you've got that in the tool kit, that's a bonus. So right away. Oh, cool. Typography. Oh, they can work with footage. You've now shown a couple skillsets right off the bat. All right. Now. So we went type when footage with type let's think maybe illustration where, you know, Speaker 0 00:13:55 The wave thing going from that to the surfboard. I really don't think we need this stuff before it. Do you think that Speaker 1 00:14:04 I like, uh, I like this guy. Yeah. I love Speaker 0 00:14:07 That. And the runner is amazing. Speaker 1 00:14:09 And the runner. Yeah. So we got some fun screen direction we're going left to right. For you film folk that you'll know that that's sort of like the hero goes from left to right. Screen direction. Yes. Now, one thing about this shot, let's, let's just preview that and I'm going to go, let's trim this right here. Let's wash this. It's a fun shot. It's it's, it's a little static in terms of camera, right? Speaker 0 00:14:45 There is no camera. And I would say that would be a comment about most of his, uh, kinda made it work would be to every once in awhile, put some drift on it, make it feel a little more cinematic or things like that. Speaker 1 00:14:59 Exactly. Right. So this can be done with scale. This can be done with a camera. We're going to do it with a camera just to kind of demo that. And of course, if you do this in your comp, you're not going to run into some of maybe the resolution issues. So I'm going to make this a 3d layer. Well, just Speaker 0 00:15:15 A little, Speaker 1 00:15:17 Yeah. Yeah. It'll be fine. A new camera. I'm a big fan of the single note I use both, but I often use the one node camera because especially in after effects, someone hit. Okay. We're going to, Speaker 0 00:15:32 That does remind me as you're doing those. So like make sure when you render your files, most of you are probably just delivering MP4 files or sharing that render everything has progress because then you can use it in a montage and things like that. You could do a little stuff like this on top of it. Speaker 1 00:15:48 Yeah, exactly. That's a great point. Right. At least they pro Rez master or an animation press and master, so yeah. And that double compression. Okay. So now we've got a camera in the scene and for those who are maybe not super familiar with cameras, basically it's a camera. It's looking at our scene here. And what we're going to do is something very, we're going to do a simple drift. So I'm going to hit P for position. I'm going to key frame that. And really what I want to do is I want to play with this third position parameter. This is Z. And I'm just going to kind of just kind of drift forward, just pushing it. All right. Let's and you can kind of see in this left, this top view, all the Cameron's doing is it's creeping forward. So let's go back to one view. Let's see how that feels. Right. It just adds some secondary motion. And that's something that I kind of talk a lot about with cameras is this idea that the camera can be primary, do a big dramatic move, or it can be more secondary where it's just it's there it's active, but it can be subtle. It doesn't always have to be doing crazy stuff. Speaker 0 00:17:10 <inaudible> Given that site. Speaker 1 00:17:15 You like that? It's a happy, happy little key frame, but instead of the Bob Ross, Afro, I got a big old beard. Okay. All right. Cool. And this is a nice shot right after, and it's part of the same project. So a lot of times students are like, do I have to show the same? If I'm going to like cut two or three shots out of a project for the montage. So they all have to be together. And again, we go back to, well, you don't have to do anything, but it has to work. So I do like this idea of like little mini montage is sometimes, sometimes the students will try to spread out to make it feel like they have more work than they actually do. And that's usually evident. I can usually tell when they're doing that. It's very obvious. So yeah. Speaker 0 00:18:07 Yeah. If we're watching a real and a montage and it is basically a cut down of a project or two where like, why didn't you just show us those two Speaker 1 00:18:16 To show it exactly. Right. So this, this feels nice. Like, boom, boom. Yeah. This has a lot of movement. And it's even got, you've got, Speaker 0 00:18:25 It's got a camera in it, but it's tracking with the guy. So I think this is great. This is a great example. Speaker 1 00:18:31 John already did a pretty good job of editing a lot of this to eat. So now we're gonna see how we look going this shot. Speaker 1 00:18:47 It feels pretty good. Right. And then Speaker 1 00:19:03 Okay, cool. And let's see, Lynn, we're going here now. We've got this shot. I didn't think this was a particularly strong shot. And I thought this went a little too long. I wasn't crazy about that flower transition. So we're gonna, we're gonna trim this somewhere around here, Speaker 0 00:19:22 Right before the mouth. Speaker 1 00:19:24 And we're gonna, we're gonna, we're going to throw this later back and we use it a little later. I think, I think the way he had it, which was like, that was pretty nice. Yeah. And I forgot to turn that. Let's trim this one. All right. Let's see how this works. Speaker 1 00:19:51 That's good. It feels good. Right. So we've gone from type to some treated footage with some more type to some illustration, to some more kind of fun photographic, Lich kind of work. What do you think? Maybe, maybe let's see what let's look at our options and we'll think about what we want to do next. Uh, oh, I like that back to type. Maybe that could be nice, right? Yeah. I think that's a good idea Speaker 0 00:20:19 As to another color palette too, which is good. Speaker 1 00:20:22 Yeah. So w but this up, and we will take a look at how that looks Speaker 1 00:20:34 Did you see it? Yeah. You got a couple dead frames. You got dead frames, Erin. So you got about three dead frames. 1, 2, 3 frames where there's, there's a very subtle, I don't know, texture moves, but the camera's not doing anything. The types, not animating dead frames Speaker 0 00:20:56 When you're, I mean, you shouldn't have dead frames in any peace period, unless I'm going to just say that, like, there would be like an extreme circumstance where you would want to do that Speaker 1 00:21:08 When nothing's moving and emotion piece, it's usually acute to the audience that the piece is over and it's time to do something swipe. Speaker 0 00:21:17 Yeah. So sometimes just trying like something as simple as like an invert or a color shift or something like that could be a fun, little, essentially a flash frame, but it's colorful, you know, Speaker 1 00:21:31 Let's give that a try invert, boom, 1, 2, 3. We will then trim command shift D and then on this guy, we're going to turn off the invert. Let's see how that looks. Speaker 0 00:21:46 And that brings us to the Speaker 1 00:21:52 Right. That's a nice little, Speaker 0 00:21:54 Yeah. And so what we're doing here is we're not holding the work we've done in our other pieces. So precious. We've added cameras, we've trimmed shit out and here we're messing with the color. So I think it's fair to say. When you use something for a montage, there is flexibility to make it work within the construct of the montage and not the montage. Speaker 1 00:22:18 That's a very fancy guy. You said that Speaker 0 00:22:22 Just keep going, Speaker 1 00:22:23 Keep going. Right. So we've gone type. I think this, this is a fun little character walks. I go, it is in terms of the camera a bit static. So we're going to try a little, little something else and I'm just going to keep moving things around. Okay. Cool. All right. So, okay. So let's try another camera. We could do a simple drift again, or we can try. I talked about a few minutes ago that I like to think about cameras, either primary or secondary emotion. So primary is the big move. Secondary is the subtle move. Let's try a little primary and see if we can't add a little, little drama to the mix. So we've got a new camera and we're going to try, we made this a 3d layer, and we know last time we did, um, a push in, let's try a little bit of a different move, where we're actually going to be pushing, calling the camera out. We're going to push the camera way in, right up in the grill, this little cup face Speaker 0 00:23:32 In that comp Speaker 1 00:23:34 In the calm. So you don't lose, Speaker 0 00:23:36 But if you don't want to their solutions, you know, Speaker 1 00:23:40 Right. And a few of them are going to be that, look, this is going to happen really fast. We're going to eat this F nine or going to go into the graph and we're going to crank it strong, ease in, right. We're going to see what that looks like. So some of that, like the resolution breaking down, it's happening so fast. The other thing we do is we can throw a little motion blur on this motion blur, and sometimes I might even go, boom. Okay. Now it's already right. Resolution fixed Speaker 3 00:24:17 Gear projects. Speaker 1 00:24:19 Was that, do your projects auto save not unless I save it one time, you think I should save it? Yeah. All right. Let's put this on a <inaudible>. We should do an episode on project structure and organization, not this episode, but we should do that. Speaker 1 00:24:46 Something that I tend to do, especially if it's going to be big move, drift, big move drift, which a lot of projects, rhythmically kind of work like that is I will split my camera layer, command shift, D D D, and then I'll hit you to unfold my key frames. Right? And then I will clear all the key frames. Boom. Now the values, these are the same. Right? And I will re-key it. Now I've gotten rid of all the interpolation, all the influence from the last key frame. And then I will continue my drift here. And even though we've got two different camera layers. Now, as long as these two, the key frames here, the values of the same, it should feel seamless. No, that was very subtle. We can make it more dramatic. We can noodle it. We can do all kinds of things, but that's a little, it's a little trick I want to drop on you. All right. All right. What do we got left? We got a couple. We've got this shot and this is kind of fun. We've got our little yellow. Let's let's go. So we've basically reversed your real job. You're welcome. Yes. It's like a time remap. Okay, honey. Let's see how this shot looks Speaker 3 00:26:15 Kind of slow. Speaker 1 00:26:19 So let's go into my right click on my columns anywhere on up here. And I'm going to bring out my stretch, which is like going to let me go globally. Uh, change the timing now, everything by default. So the a hundred percent you can always go faster. If I go 50% is going to make everything twice as fast on that particular layer. If you go. Yeah, let's see what that looks like. Probably a little too fast, but if you can go below a hundred percent makings faster, if you go above a hundred percent, you're going to add home hold frames. It's just going to start feeling stuttering. So I don't know. Let's go like 65%. Speaker 1 00:27:12 There is a moment there. That's weird. Which one is it? It's on the way to the last shot in here too fast. We, what we can do is we can split it here and then just let that go. Boom. Okay. All right. Let's see how this looks in contexts with this other shot. Speaker 1 00:27:40 What's that? We're in that pat we're in that pallet, it's kind of fun back there. What about a transition maybe stomped in between our sailboat and our fun collage piece here. Right? Cause it is kind of just like cutting to nothing. Let's do this. We're going to move. Let's do it like maybe a 10 frame. Let's see what a 10 frame swipe looks like. And I'm kinda slide this shot all the way off screen, if you want to nudge it right up here. Right. So it's like that. And then we're going to parent this layer to the layer below parent pick whip position. And then we're going to just check to make sure that we're nudged and it looks pretty good. Okay. So we're going to slide off screen and we want to just bring that right to there. Ish. Cool. So let's see what that looks like. Yeah. That's the idea. Yeah. It needs, it needs some easing. So let's go F nine on both Better. And if we want, we could really crank that is in. Yeah, Speaker 1 00:29:12 Right. It feels like a social swipe. Let's see how it looks all together. Chad Speaker 0 00:29:44 And even like, work's going back to that car. Speaker 1 00:29:46 Yeah. And a loop. It works pretty nicely. Let's take a look at where we started. So here's, John's real. Let's play this down. Speaker 1 00:30:25 Right. And then our re cut Speaker 0 00:30:55 I think it's a big difference. Speaker 1 00:30:56 Right? And it's all the same work. It's all John's work, but it's just been reordered. I mean, just sort of recap we've we kind of front-loaded with what we thought were the strongest pieces. We're thinking typography to footage. We had a little camera drift on this shot. We kept these, these were cool. We did a little, a little fun invert to kind of work with that dead, those dead frames. We could have trimmed them, but I like this solution gives a little something there. Nice type he's got, we added a more dramatic camera move with a little, a little drift here. Super. We did some speed ramping. We, we sped this shot up and then we added a fun, little transition right there. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, oh, I think I need to fix that, but I'm not going to right now, but I would fix that. Well, yeah, yeah. That could be the quick fix. Thank you for that suggestion, Oop. And just make sure that it's Speaker 0 00:32:00 Overlapping there. Yeah, Speaker 1 00:32:03 We are perfectionist. Yeah. You kinda gotta be perfect and then make sure this guy goes right. So I'm going to stop share. And I'm going to say thank you to John for submitting your first submission. Uh, our first submission and, and, uh, rework. Yeah. Right. Is that, did I say that right? Yeah. Well, Speaker 0 00:32:27 Okay. So we had a bunch of submissions and we specifically chose this one because we, you know, we felt like you were in a good place and could use a little bit of like the hacks. I think we real well, one, we were pre really appreciate all the reels we're getting and all the feedback we're getting about. Even this before we even started at people, I think are very curious what it's going to be. And I think in this situation is there's a lot of very practical things we could show and impart on you and do a traditional kind of teaching, like, like how Austin broke it apart and showed how we not just reorder it. But there are things that you could do very practically to fix and noodle and make it more, um, Speaker 1 00:33:09 Basically we do enhance it. It's good. There is good, but we want to enhance it and present it the best way possible because ultimately with that, the montage is a lot of the times they first impression and you want to make a strong first impression as possible. Speaker 0 00:33:26 Okay. So until next time we're going to do the Austin peace. See you soon.