What to Bring to a Demo Reel Editor

"Hey, it's Craig Scime from Clearstarmedia.com and we're speaking today on Expert Village about demo reels. Yes, primarily for actors, but of course demo reels can be used for just about anything that you need to showcase your ability to somebody else. What you bring when you go to meet with an editor. Well you obviously want to get all your footage. And as we talked about earlier, you want to find out how you're paying for this. If you're paying for it by the hour, you want to make sure all your footage is cued up to exactly where you need to be. So bring your DVD's. Obviously you can't cue up a DVD, but you want to know what times that you're going to be used in that DVD or maybe the chapter point. With your tapes, of course, cue them up. VHS or even mini DV, which I forgot to mention, is a huge and very, very popular format. Cue it up or know what time is on there so you can get it right to the editor. Then the next thing you want to decide is how are you going to put all this together and how are you going to showcase your name and showcase your ability. Are you going to do a montage? And if you have a favorite song that you want to use. Maybe there's a song that you like to use that is a good reflection of you. Or maybe you want us to pull out some production music that we have. But of course, I think you know what songs you like and those songs will probably work best for your reel. Let's take a look at a couple of quick reels here. The montage. This is what a lot of people like to use when they put it in. So they put their demo reel in, they see some high action, high energy. We've got some music going here. It's certainly keeping the attention of anyone who watches. Now montage has a lot of quick clips. A lot of big, fast cuts showcasing a lot of the actor's ability. And then we showcase the name which is right there. This actor wanted a font that was very simple. And then the next thing we'll do is we showcase his best ability. You want to showcase next, right after the montage, if you decide to go with the montage, showcase your best piece of work. Let's take a look at this next actor here. This actor does a little special way of showcasing his name. He found a font that he feels fits him, and then gets right to the heart of his acting. Gets right to the best piece of acting that he has. And that's what's really important. Next actor I'm going to showcase, I'm just skipping through here, this next actor, again, shows his name right away. But then he gets to a quick little montage. This actor didn't have as much video, so what we did is we put a little quick montage together that was very short, maybe only ten seconds, then got back to his best footage. And then the other actor, there's another actor here, that has a really exciting song. And the one thing as an editor, a good editor will always want to cut your clips to the beat. Make sure they do that because it's not wrong if they don't cut it to the beat, but when it's edited to the beat, it really makes a lot more sense. It really just grows. So this actor here, we cut everything right to the beat. It goes bam, bam, bam and then we showcase his name in a unique way that he wanted to do. One thing I don't think is necessary is, some actors like to put their head shot first on their demo reel. I really don't feel this is necessary. First off, I think it takes away and shows a little bit, it shows a head shot which of course you've already probably given your casting director or agent a head shot. I think it takes away from the time that they will use to view it. Now this particular actor that I'm showing, he needed this to be on the front of his. He needed this to be a head shot for the particular project that he was submitting for. But most actors, I say don't waste your time on putting a head shot on the front of the demo reel because most likely, you've already given them a head shot and resume I hope. So we'll talk more about demo reels in our next segment. Stick around."