note: I'd like to stress that i am showing my showreel as an example of what i'm discussing and not as a portfolio post.

Hi everyone,

I made my first "official" showreel about a week ago and was wondering how people thought was the best way to make them etc.

I've seen people with one showreel for everything but also people with multiple showreels sorted by genre. Some people include full tracks (almost like a playlist) and others include fragments (about 1 minute).

In mine I went for one showreel with as many varied pieces as I had (1 minute-ish of each).

http://soundcloud.co...n/2011-showreel

I think i got quite attached and included perhaps far too long a sample of some pieces and maybe too many pieces but I have yet to see if it is truly effective.

Do let me know how you go about making a showreel and what you've found to be the most effective way of doing so.

Thanks very much,

Calum

This is a good question. I agree - show montages upfront to get a client interested. Later - once they're really evaluating you deeper you can share full tracks.

The way I have mine set up is when you go to my home page there are four samplers - each under four minutes long and assigned various moods. For example I have a epic, doom-n-gloom, tension sampler then a light, happy, casual, fun sampler. My thinking was to not split up demo based on orchestral vs rock vs jazz, etc. I was worried that would create too many samplers for a potential client to browse. So instead I focused on what kind of emotion(s) would the client like to see supported musically and went with that. I've only recently made this change but I think it works pretty well.

You have some really nice tracks uploaded. Keep up the good work!

Thanks,

Nate

Thanks for the reply - it was very helpful. I agree that the idea of separating the showreel into moods is very effective. That way you can direct clients to the showreel that would be specifically relevant to them. I think once I have more material under my belt I will attempt to split it up like this.
Thanks for the kind words nate!

You're welcome!