How to Match a Demo Reel to Your Personality

Video Transcript

"Hey, it's Craig Scime from Clearstarmedia.com and today we're talking about demo reels. Primarily for actors, but they're used to everybody right here on Expert Village. In our last segment, and certainly you can go back and click on the site here and take a look at how we showcased some of the actors' names. The way that it's presented, the music they used, maybe in a montage or the music they used to bring their name up, the font that they chose to bring their name up and if they did anything fancy with their name. It's not important to do that, however it makes it a little more visually exciting and of course it might be a little bit more along your personality. If your personality is a very Times New Roman, very plain and that's your personality and you want your name to just come right up on the screen with that font, that's you. If you want your name to spin out because you're a fun, playful person and you want some music to go with that, well then I certainly encourage that as well. We also showed, in the last segment some montages. We showed some high energy montages and then we went into the name and then we went into the meat or the best piece of acting that the actor provided us with. The other thing you want to remember when you're doing a montage, is that I like to use clips, if possible, that are not used within the rest of the reel. So you want to showcase some things that are not in the rest of the reel like if you are doing a segment and you're on a TV show. Well, and it's a great piece that you're going to use for the meat of your demo reel, then let's not use a clip from that. Let's use a clip from something else to make the montage because they're already going to see that later. Let's showcase a lot of quick little clips in your montage with your music and make it real exciting of other things that you have to offer. If you don't have a lot of stuff, that's okay. Maybe the montage isn't something that you want to get into. Or maybe we'll do a really short montage. Speaking of short. A montage, I think, should stay under thirty seconds. We don't want to waste the Casting Director's or Agent's time showing this long, lengthy montage of all your work. That's great that you've done a lot of work and that's great that you can showcase in a montage, but it doesn't need to be two minutes. Let's get right to the meat of your reel. Finally, what do you put at the end of the reel? Well, we'll talk about that, because we're running a little low on time, in our next segment. So you'll have to find out what it is. Stay tuned."