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Leading animators working in the industry knows how to catapult their career to the next level with a carefully crafted showcase of their masterpieces.
To stay on the top of the animation industry as a leading animator, it is essential to have a great show reel to hook the prospective employers to get the position you desire in the industry.No matter how brilliant or skilled you are, or if you have mastered the art of character animation or 3D designing skills, if you don’t have a portfolio to showcase your work, you cannot be successful.
Working as a freelancing animator and taking charge of the entire animation process or looking forward to getting hired as an animator at an animation studio, the first thing that’ll make an impression on the employer is your portfolio. Your show reel is not something that just tells the employer about your work; it is something that tells about your passion for creativity and your experience in the field.
So what is the path to making a successful portfolio of your work? Here are some tips and best practices of top animators that can be applied to make an eye-catching and attention-grabbing portfolio.
Focus On The Characters
Characters don’t only mean the characters of the video,but it means being original. Your portfolio needs personality,and good character animation can help you creating personality in your portfolio. Animators must not only focus on the technical and physical movement of a particular character but having compelling characters to make attractive and captivating videos. It is necessary for it has emotions that excite the audience or viewers to hire you as their animator.
Target Your Audience
One of the most critical features of creating a compelling portfolio is to know about your audience and whom is the portfolio meant for. Whether you want to work at a gaming studio, VFX studio, or as a character animator, you should design your portfolio according to the field of animation you want to work for. Knowing the person or studio, you’re interviewing with will get you the position you need in the industry.
Try To Grab The Attention Of Your Viewer
People who will be interviewing you have seconds to go through your work and make a decision about it. It is best if you keep your best works first and keep your closing strong. Consider this, companies and studios have a lot on their plate,and they need to find something quick. Going through your portfolio with all the best videos in the start will likely get their attention,or they will turn to another candidate in their list.
Share Your Work Everywhere
Your demo reel is something that is really going to get your desired job. Adding a link to your resume of the work that you were doing and shared on the internet is going to land you on the position you yearn for.
Showcase Your Skillset
Your portfolio is basically the representation of your work as well as your skills and expertise in the field of animation. Keeping the different categories of animation in different pages of your website can prove to be useful as it is going to demonstrate your skillset in the various fields of animation. An animator is expected to be creative and innovative for which classifying different work in a separate page is going to help the employer to analyze and hire you as an animator quickly.
Create One Major Focus
It would be best if you focused on showing original work in your portfolio. If you are showing your capabilities, make sure that you have a clear and focused direction of the path as well as your destination. Successful portfolios are organized and present original ideas. Showing all your abilities in the field does not have any disadvantage but be careful that you do not include too much. Furthermore, you need to show how much of a creative problem solver you are and what makes you stand out among all the other animators in the field.
Keep Adding New Work To Your Portfolio
Adding new work to your portfolio shows that you are gaining more and more experience in the field of animation. It is the way in which you show your progress and improvement in the skills and an employer needs to know that you are continuously oiling your abilities and ready to step out of your comfort zone. It doesn’t have to be something that you were paid for; it could just include anything you created on an animation software to experiment. Adding it to your portfolio is going to help your employer in knowing what you are capable of doing.
Don’t Forget Your Details
Details are important as it includes your personal information, your hobbies, experience, contact info, your credentials, and education. This is important as it tells the employer just how knowledgeable you are about the field. It also includes your social media links which make it easy to navigate through your work. Apart from that, if you might have had help from some other animators in the process, you need to add the part that you made,so it doesn’t mislead the employer.
Think Of Entertaining Your Audience
The animation is about storytelling in a fun and engaging way. Your employer just doesn’t need to see your skills as an animator; they also need to know how much creative can you get with the storytelling. It’s up to you that you write full scripts or put together some pieces like a silent movie with background music, you need to make sure that it is mesmerizing. In other words, you don’t need complex rigs to make a mark, instead, out of the box ideas can do the job!
