okay, reel feedback.
i didn’t realize until i saw your reel, that you’re a local boy
.
first the caveats: I used to be an art director in web/interactive, so i have a pretty good eye, and i’m used to screening talent, BUT not for 3d/Film/Vid, so take what i have to say as you see fit. (I hope you really wanted feedback, not attaboys, and i apologize if it sounds harsh, it isn’t meant to be :D) I’m assuming you’re looking for a job as modeller/character modeller, because that’s what’s at the front of your reel.
And my comments in no particular order:
I like your site design, although it could be a bit larger–pretty much anyone you’re targeting would have at least 1024x768 display. I generally like the reel, so just because what follows is a list of things i think you could work on, it doesn’t mean there weren’t good bits, too
.
The music is really bad. Not necessarily the choice, which i wasn’t wild about, but that could just be a preference thing, but the audio quality–even after the QT is cached it pops, and breaks up. Definitely, if you don’t change anything else, recompress the clip so it streams better.
i would consider putting some kind of bumper or overlay on each segement to tell the viewer what they’re looking at, what parts you did, if it was collaborative (eg greenscreen: did you shoot the video, or just do the compositing), and possibly what SW was used. I’ve watched it a couple times now, and I still don’t know what i was supposed to see with the figure skater.
Your models in general are great. That male model kicks butt, i have no idea why it wouldn’t have made the top row here on the zbrush site, except maybe that it never gets finished and never gets textured. Which brings me to a couple points about all your models. First, there’s too much “slide-show” presentation–characters either presented as stills, or as spinning models. Second, none of them ever seem to get textured, and only the one face gets animated (and it’s great BTW). IMHO, that old man’s face is the best segment on the reel from a presentation point of view–the way it segues from photorefereence to wire to model to animation. I really think that if you’re looking for work in this field, even if it isn’t animation work, employers are going to want to see that your characters deform properly. And I think they’re likely to be interested in seeing crossover skills in texturing and rigging. So get those characters finished and get them moving! I think a good way to present a model is something like this: concept sketch, cross-dissolve to static wire frame, wireframe starts to turn in the round, to textured version (also turning), to object in action (eg, your camera pass of the plane is more visually interesting than the slide show of it that follows), and for characters, show them bending and moving. all with overlays to tell the viewer what they’re looking at, eg. base topology/maya, displacement map/zbrush.
The way the background and framing keeps changing is a bit distracting. I wouldn’t repeat the framing from your site–reusing it means that the images within are that much smaller.
Some of the object spins don’t seem to be smooth–like they have dropped frames or something.
I think it’s good to show multiple view of an object, but not when they overlap each other–it makes it harder to read the silhouette of the object.
Hope your not annoyed by all this. Good luck with your hunt. 