Today I started working on my reel. I have the intro done with my name but that is it. Here is a sample I threw together with a small segment of my work, most of it from my internship this summer:

Tell me what you think of the intro.

Hello readers! It's a new semester and as you can tell from the lack of posts I have been very busy as of late. I just got back from shooting a documentary in Germany about the Holocaust. It was a really great experience. Editing should be complete by April if all goes as planned and I may show snippets off and on before then. I think this film will be getting in numerous festivals if we play our cards right; which is always exciting.

I wanted to write a post about Demo reels because I feel a lot of my peers either don't have one or don't put a very interesting one together. Now that it is January and many seniors are looking for their first job and all the underclassmen like myself should be looking for an internship a demo reel is a great starting point to get your foot in the door.

This is the third year I will be looking for an internship and my third demo reel will be made shortly. Good demos set you apart from others who may have a nice looking resume and we work in a visual field why not wow them visually? I have 3 tips that I'd like to share for anyone putting together a reel.

1) Edit to music.

Make it fast and catchy and edit to the beat. This isn't very hard to do and makes anything look pretty cool. Go ahead and pick your favorite song, it's a demo reel you aren't going to get in trouble. Just be creative with it. (No Britney Spears)

2)Put your best stuff at the very beginning.

Who ever is reviewing your reel may have 50 others to look at and may only watch 10-30 seconds of your tape before deciding yes or no. So go ahead and put your best stuff right at the front don't save it and hope for the best, if they like they will continue.

3)Make sure they know what they are watching and who made it

This is really two things in one. First, make sure you put only work that you made. Don't try to sell that you made graphics for a project that you were a grip on. Employers want to see what you can do. Give them any original work you have done, and if you don't have much just make a fake commercial (it's actually really fun). Second, put your name at the beginning and the end and make it creative. You're a creative person so no white text on a black screen, jazz it up!

Those are my three tips to anyone making a demo reel that is trying to get it seen. I followed these 3 ideas and they landed me two incredible internships so I must be doing someting right (I hope). Below I put my reel from 2008 for you to review. You can probably pick it apart, but here it is.

This video was produced by Loras College Productions so I got to see bits and pieces of it before the final cut and when I saw it I really did feel I needed pass it along because sexual violence affects a lot of people. According to the video 25% of women in college are raped before they graduate; it's a scary thought. So here it is:

I encourage all of you to pass it on to 5 of your friends because the Riverview Center does great work.

We are 13 days out from the election and that means we are full steam planning for our election night coverage. I will be taking a break from posting until then. Look for a whole synopsis of our coverage in the days before. We have some exciting things happening that have never been done before.

Thanks for reading!

Yesterday I saw a post on Bryan Murley's Blog College Media Innovation about the new Youtube uploader. Since I use Youtube on our website for all of our video content, except full shows (youtube doesn't let us upload more than 10 minutes), I decided to try this new uploader for our SportZONE stories this week.

I am currently uploading 6 videos to Youtube at the moment. So far I liked the interface, it has the same exact functionality of the original uploader, but it allows you to upload up to 10 videos at once. I find this kind of deceiving because it only uploads one at a time, the others are put in waiting to be queued up. Before I would just open multiple windows and upload all of them at the same time.

The one thing that seems to be a very big negative for this new uploader is how long it is taking to upload a video. I currently have an 18 mb file being processed and it has taken over 15 minutes so far, and I still have five more to go.

I will update when everything is uploaded.

UPDATEThe uploader did not end up working for me. It only uploaded one of the six videos and did not keep the name, description, or tags that I gave it. I went back to how I used to upload videos. (multiple windows with one video at a time)

Here's a photo of the upload screen: