This is a little off topic but a hobby of mine and a great tool to learn. If you are a creative individual who can design well this tutorial is for you. Have you made a website in Photoshop but wished you could create the css? This will tell you step by step. It is the best.

Enjoy.

This weeks video comes from a post I saw on the Daily Inspiration Room. It is a viral video from Warchild Canada. Watch for yourself then head to this website to learn more: http://www.helpchildsoldiers.com/

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.

One of the best commercials I have seen in a long time. Great originality and makes you smile.

I am already bored over break so I decided to take the Loras commercial and turn it into a graphic spot. It still needs tweaking and this is a low quality render but you get the point. I think it could work if you swapped out some of the words and put in a VO.

I used music from Shockwave Sound.

Here is the real one: