Help please!!

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	Topic: Help please!!
Posted : 25/01/10 / Views : 1030 / Replies : 15 /
sihiggins 95 posts last on: 06/02/12 send private reply	Hello, I am busy trying to edit my showreel together but it is driving me mad! Does anyone know where I can get it done professionally for cheap cheap??? I would love your help Thanks Simon

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	Reply #1
Posted : 23/01/10
JessicaLucy 4 posts last on: 4 hours send private reply	Hi Simon, I'm also in the same boat. I sadly don't have any footage but would love to get a show reel together. However to have them filmed AND edited is a REAL nightmare. I just don't get it. Since your post have you been through the showreel companies on here to find a good one? thats what I'm doing, slowly but surley. x

	Reply #2
Posted : 23/01/10
Lena.Andersson 60 posts last on: 04/01/12 send private reply	Hi Simon Spotlight will edit your show reel and they are quite cheap. Lena :)

	Reply #3
Posted : 23/01/10
aidan.stephenson 115 posts last on: 15/01/12 send private reply	simon give mark kempner a go...he`s one of us and knows his stuff and very reasonable..did mine for not too much wonga!

	Reply #4
Posted : 23/01/10
David.Laurence 198 posts last on: 2 hours send private reply	Mm,cheap cheap means could look rubbish rubbish. I have a suggestion to anybody here looking for a showreel . There area number of very good film and Tv schools in the London area who have students that train in all areas of media. These students often have access to industry grade equipment,but often need two things.Money and experience.Perhaps you could strike a deal with students from one of these institutions.Some ready cash and experience for them,a showreel for you. Ive just shot a short horror film for the guys and girls at the film school in Beconsfield.Lovely place ,well equipped,and with enough experience to go on and work in this tough industry. But its up to you as to what you do.Im just throwing the idea out there.An interesting afterthought,is that at sometime in the future all these students expect to be working in the industry.Make a student happy,and make a contact for the future.

Reply #4

Posted : 23/01/10

David.Laurence
198 posts
last on: 2 hours
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Mm,cheap cheap means could look rubbish rubbish.

I have a suggestion to anybody here looking for a showreel .

There area number of very good film and Tv schools in the London area who have students that train in all areas of media.

These students often have access to industry grade equipment,but often need two things.Money and experience.Perhaps you could strike a deal with students from one of these institutions.Some ready cash and experience for them,a showreel for you.
Ive just shot a short horror film for the guys and girls at the film school in Beconsfield.Lovely place ,well equipped,and with enough experience to go on and work in this tough industry.

But its up to you as to what you do.Im just throwing the idea out there.An interesting afterthought,is that at sometime in the future all these students expect to be working in the industry.Make a student happy,and make a contact for the future.

	Reply #5
Posted : 24/01/10
leeravitz 1543 posts last on: 20 hours send private reply	Hi Si, This is not exactly the advice you are looking for (which is basically the name of a good editor - maybe Mark would be a good call - although I've no idea of his rates), but bear with it: I would agree that your showreel is an important tool, and that you do not wish to waste money on a poorly put together piece, but I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the basic editing together of a showreel so that it is presentable and does a solid job is not that difficult and needn't be that expensive. The important thing is for you to a) know what you want from the showreel and b) be in a good position to liase with the provider, so that they don't dump a useless edit on you, which you can then do nothing to alter to your taste. My best advice for what you are looking for: 1. To montage or not to montage? It remains an open question - but I recently heard a theory which was as good a defence of the montage as I have come across. This was that it is not an exercise in self-indulgent showcasing so much, as an opportunity to give casters (providing we assume they play the reel from the beginning!) the chance to begin to identify what your face looks like. As I think I remember from your previous reel (?), one of the problems in some scenes was identifying which character was being played by you. One way around this is to establish through a (brisk i.e. 30 second or so) montage that your face looks such and such a way. Another alternative is to open with a stills headshot, although this may be less dynamic as an opening gambit. And make sure your name is prominently displayed, so they can link the identity to the face. 2. Go into the scenes you have. Caption them if you like, you think it read wells, and it's unobtrusive, or don't - I don't think this makes so much difference. Remember to try and deliver the essence of what the character does within the scene, which means being brutal and working like a good editor - cut to the significant moments that make your performance look intriguing, and try not to overstay your welcome. Once the point is made, move onto the next sequence. I am not totally convinced of the mythical idea that a CD will only watch 30 seconds of something and decide whether or not they can bear to stay with the showreel after that - in my opinion, if they are going to spend the time to view a showreel at all, then watching one for three minutes duration is not exactly taking a lot of time out of their day - and, in honesty, who can make an educated decision without having watched you perform for a short while, at least? But what is certainly true is that, if your scenes start to be boring, you will put the CD off, and they will end up fast forwarding through the tape hoping to find the good bits. If you can grip them, you want to - because being gripping reads well for you. 3. Painful though it is to realise, you should always be trying to make sure that every contribution to the showreel shows a decent quality, and is preferably braodcast worthy. A lot of student films sadly don't come up to scratch in this regard - industry professionals who are used to watching high end products will not so much extend sympathy to you for having done a good job in trying circumstances as lose the thread of what your performance is conveying if they are actually distracted by the terrible camera framing, misapplied lighting or bad sound quality. If the editor can help you to improve slightly ropey material in post production, then try and get them to. If you have some decent material and a lot of rubbish with which to bulk it out, try and reduce the inclusion of the rubbish and focus on reproducing the decent material. It is not a cardinal sin to return to the same material several times if it genuinely your best work, but try and ensure that it appears in short sharp bursts, with other snippets interspersed to break the material up, and, if possible, use different scenes, if you have material from a fairly lengthy piece. It is a mistake to assume that what CD'S are looking for is variation in your characterisation necessarily (in point of fact, they may prefer your work if you are easily typecastable from what they can see), but your scenes should be interesting in of themselves - don't keep hammering them over the head with the same point if you can avoid it (they will be tacitly saying to themselves 'Show me something else') and certainly don't keep a scene playing out beyond the point at which it stops being intriguing. 4. End with some contact details, so that everyone who may wish to track you down further can do so - keep it simple; representative, Spotlight link, contact number etc. Different providers may give you this package in a number of different ways, ranging from the serviceable to the beautiful, and it is true, I think, that the more aesthetically pleasing the showreel the more it attracts attention (and that costs, of course - not to mention the fact that the better the original production you were involved in, the better the end product tends to look!!). But, with that said, all good showreels follow the same basic rules outlined above, and if you can't yet put together a superlative looking one, you can at least put together a good, professional looking one (which may be, in turn, what generates the better looking work which will, in turn, provide the centrepiece for future showreels). Your job is really to make sure that you are getting what you need career wise from the provider/editors and not be fobbed off with their own fancy ideas, like providing you with a ten minute opening montage as a demonstration of their 'editing skills'.

Reply #5

Posted : 24/01/10

leeravitz
1543 posts
last on: 20 hours
send private reply

Hi Si,

This is not *exactly* the advice you are looking for (which is basically the name of a good editor - maybe Mark would be a good call - although I've no idea of his rates), but bear with it:

I would agree that your showreel is an important tool, and that you do not wish to waste money on a poorly put together piece, but I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the basic editing together of a showreel so that it is presentable and does a solid job is *not that difficult and needn't be that expensive*. The important thing is for you to a) know what you want from the showreel and b) be in a good position to liase with the provider, so that they don't dump a useless edit on you, which you can then do nothing to alter to your taste.

My best advice for what you are looking for:

1. To montage or not to montage? It remains an open question - but I recently heard a theory which was as good a defence of the montage as I have come across. This was that it is not an exercise in self-indulgent showcasing so much, as an opportunity to give casters (providing we assume they play the reel from the beginning!) the chance to begin to identify what your face looks like. As I think I remember from your previous reel (?), one of the problems in some scenes was identifying which character was being played by you. One way around this is to establish through a (brisk i.e. 30 second or so) montage that your face looks such and such a way. Another alternative is to open with a stills headshot, although this may be less dynamic as an opening gambit. And make sure your name is prominently displayed, so they can link the identity to the face.

2. Go into the scenes you have. Caption them if you like, you think it read wells, and it's unobtrusive, or don't - I don't think this makes so much difference. Remember to try and deliver the essence of what the character does within the scene, which means being brutal and working like a good editor - cut to the significant moments that make your performance look intriguing, and try not to overstay your welcome. Once the point is made, move onto the next sequence. I am not totally convinced of the mythical idea that a CD will only watch 30 seconds of something and decide whether or not they can bear to stay with the showreel after that - in my opinion, if they are going to spend the time to view a showreel at all, then watching one for three minutes duration is not exactly taking a lot of time out of their day - and, in honesty, who can make an educated decision without having watched you perform for a short while, at least? But what is certainly true is that, if your scenes start to be boring, you will put the CD off, and they will end up fast forwarding through the tape hoping to find the good bits. If you can grip them, you want to - because being gripping reads well for you.

3. Painful though it is to realise, you should always be trying to make sure that every contribution to the showreel shows a decent quality, and is preferably braodcast worthy. A lot of student films sadly *don't* come up to scratch in this regard - industry professionals who are used to watching high end products will not so much extend sympathy to you for having done a good job in trying circumstances as lose the thread of what your performance is conveying if they are actually distracted by the terrible camera framing, misapplied lighting or bad sound quality. If the editor can help you to improve slightly ropey material in post production, then try and get them to. If you have some decent material and a lot of rubbish with which to bulk it out, try and reduce the inclusion of the rubbish and focus on reproducing the decent material. It is not a cardinal sin to return to the same material several times if it genuinely your best work, but try and ensure that it appears in short sharp bursts, with other snippets interspersed to break the material up, and, if possible, use different scenes, if you have material from a fairly lengthy piece. It is a mistake to assume that what CD'S are looking for is variation in your characterisation necessarily (in point of fact, they may prefer your work if you are easily typecastable from what they can see), but your scenes should be interesting in of themselves - don't keep hammering them over the head with the same point if you can avoid it (they will be tacitly saying to themselves 'Show me something else') and certainly don't keep a scene playing out beyond the point at which it stops being intriguing.

4. End with some contact details, so that everyone who may wish to track you down further can do so - keep it simple; representative, Spotlight link, contact number etc.

Different providers may give you this package in a number of different ways, ranging from the serviceable to the beautiful, and it is true, I think, that the more aesthetically pleasing the showreel the more it attracts attention (and that costs, of course - not to mention the fact that the better the original production you were involved in, the better the end product tends to look!!). But, with that said, all good showreels follow the same basic rules outlined above, and if you can't yet put together a superlative looking one, you can at least put together a good, professional looking one (which may be, in turn, what generates the better looking work which will, in turn, provide the centrepiece for future showreels). Your job is really to make sure that you are getting what you need career wise from the provider/editors and not be fobbed off with their own fancy ideas, like providing you with a ten minute opening montage as a demonstration of their 'editing skills'.

	Reply #6
Posted : 24/01/10
anonymous	Try www.wattsnew.net. Chris Watts did my showreel and he's not expensive and did a good job, I think! Have a look - he did what I asked him to do and is very flexible. I think I made a few mistakes in that I should have had my monologue at the beginning (instead of all the messy bits) but that was my fault! The quality is very good and he's now going to put my new headshots at the beginning for me in the next couple of weeks. Check out his website.

Reply #6

Posted : 24/01/10

anonymous

Try www.wattsnew.net. Chris Watts did my showreel and he's not expensive and did a good job, I think! Have a look - he did what I asked him to do and is very flexible. I think I made a few mistakes in that I should have had my monologue at the beginning (instead of all the messy bits) but that was my fault! The quality is very good and he's now going to put my new headshots at the beginning for me in the next couple of weeks. Check out his website.

	Reply #7
Posted : 24/01/10
leeravitz 1543 posts last on: 20 hours send private reply	In respect of the last comment - be careful with monologues on showreel; they are a double - edged sword. On the one hand, it is certainly true that a showreel should do its best to showcase your talent, and not the talents of the other actors who appear alongside you - and sometimes that can be hard to work unless you are frequently being given lead roles with extensive close up camera time in the films and programmes you shoot. One way some actors find round this is to record monologue material that focuses quite specifically on their delivery. The risk of this material is that a monologue is an inherently theatrical form. I have seen it used on rare occasions in film where it is generally meant to come across as ironic or somehow 'unreal', but the truth is, there are no significant monologues in film. Lengthy speeches, sometimes, yes, but these almost always occur as part of a process of dialogue, playing off the reactions of other actors in the scene alongside. And it is also rare for any film to go for great lengths of time without interjections from other characters occurring. It is, essentially, a dialogue driven medium - which, if truth be known, has no need for monologue as a device. It is worth thinking about this: the monologue exists in the stage play because it is the only useful way of conveying a character's inner process to the audience without having to play a subtext - the character unburdens themselves to the audience. Film generally relies on visuals to do this, instead - it is quite happy with extensive sequences of montage, intercutting of significant objects etc. to tell us what we need to know of a character's background. A film character will not make an extensive speech about how their girlfriend meant the world to them, they have now split up over another man, and he feels his world has ended, for instance (as he might in a stage play). Instead, we will see a sequence of him sitting alone in his room, tearing up her photograph, crying over his breakfast, setting fire to what we recognise as love letters etc. and in the next sequence of dialogue probably confirming that the girlfriend has left. The same story is told in an entirely different way. Because casting directors are aware of this, because they know that no extensive footage of a monologue will come from a well written film (and so either indicates that the film makers have a poor grasp of screenwriting technique, or, more likely, that you have recorded the piece on spec), and because they tend to find monologues commit the cardinal error of being 'stagey', you must always be very wary of incorporating monologue material into a showreel. There are some decent providers out there who shoot in such a way that a monologue is delivered in the context of a 'scene' and the presence of another character, and this makes the piece look (a little) like it is just a film scene in which one character does all the driving, and the other 'character' says nothing or very little - this is just about acceptable, and may work in very short, sharp bursts, as the character could feasibly have a lengthy ish speech for a time before the other character interjects. But all sorts of other cues come across as 'odd' in this scenario - there is often very little interest in the reaction shots of the other 'character', for instance, whereas film demands that speech elicits a reaction. Again, the stage conventions - that, in many ways, the other characters fall silent or become irrelevant to the main character's concerns when the monologue is delivered, look rather strange when seen on film, where characters are always reacting to what the other characters are saying. Finally, direct 'to camera' address is of very little interest to a casting director and again marks out 'staginess'. It is generally considered cardinal error number one for a screen actor to look straight at the camera lens (unless specifically asked) because it breaks the fourth wall. When it is used, as for example, in Alan Bennett's famous 'Talking Heads' (itself an example of highly theatrically styled television) or as Ian Richardson so brilliantly did in the 'House of Cards' political trilogy (when his devious central character was allowed to confide all to the camera), it is intended to break the natural flow of screen expectations. In the Richardson case, for example, it served as a way of transferring to TV the power of the aside to the theatre audience - trying to bring the audience at home into greater complicity with the character they were watching on screen. So, be very cautious when using monologue material!

Reply #7

Posted : 24/01/10

leeravitz
1543 posts
last on: 20 hours
send private reply

In respect of the last comment - be careful with monologues on showreel; they are a double - edged sword. On the one hand, it is certainly true that a showreel should do its best to showcase *your* talent, and not the talents of the other actors who appear alongside you - and sometimes that can be hard to work unless you are frequently being given lead roles with extensive close up camera time in the films and programmes you shoot. One way some actors find round this is to record monologue material that focuses quite specifically on their delivery.

The risk of this material is that a monologue is an inherently theatrical form. I have seen it used on rare occasions in film where it is generally meant to come across as ironic or somehow 'unreal', but the truth is, there are no significant monologues in film. Lengthy speeches, sometimes, yes, but these almost always occur as part of a process of dialogue, playing off the reactions of other actors in the scene alongside. And it is also rare for any film to go for great lengths of time without interjections from other characters occurring. It is, essentially, a dialogue driven medium - which, if truth be known, has no need for monologue as a device. It is worth thinking about this: the monologue exists in the stage play because it is the only useful way of conveying a character's inner process to the audience without having to play a subtext - the character unburdens themselves to the audience. Film generally relies on visuals to do this, instead - it is quite happy with extensive sequences of montage, intercutting of significant objects etc. to tell us what we need to know of a character's background. A film character will not make an extensive speech about how their girlfriend meant the world to them, they have now split up over another man, and he feels his world has ended, for instance (as he might in a stage play). Instead, we will see a sequence of him sitting alone in his room, tearing up her photograph, crying over his breakfast, setting fire to what we recognise as love letters etc. and in the next sequence of dialogue probably confirming that the girlfriend has left. The same story is told in an entirely different way.

Because casting directors are aware of this, because they know that no extensive footage of a monologue will come from a well written film (and so either indicates that the film makers have a poor grasp of screenwriting technique, or, more likely, that you have recorded the piece on spec), and because they tend to find monologues commit the cardinal error of being 'stagey', you must always be very wary of incorporating monologue material into a showreel. There are some decent providers out there who shoot in such a way that a monologue is delivered in the context of a 'scene' and the presence of another character, and this makes the piece look (a little) like it is just a film scene in which one character does all the driving, and the other 'character' says nothing or very little - this is just about acceptable, and may work in very short, sharp bursts, as the character could feasibly have a lengthy ish speech for a time before the other character interjects. But all sorts of other cues come across as 'odd' in this scenario - there is often very little interest in the reaction shots of the other 'character', for instance, whereas film demands that speech elicits a reaction. Again, the stage conventions - that, in many ways, the other characters fall silent or become irrelevant to the main character's concerns when the monologue is delivered, look rather strange when seen on film, where characters are *always* reacting to what the other characters are saying.

Finally, direct 'to camera' address is of very little interest to a casting director and again marks out 'staginess'. It is generally considered cardinal error number one for a screen actor to look straight at the camera lens (unless specifically asked) because it breaks the fourth wall. When it is used, as for example, in Alan Bennett's famous 'Talking Heads' (itself an example of highly theatrically styled television) or as Ian Richardson so brilliantly did in the 'House of Cards' political trilogy (when his devious central character was allowed to confide all to the camera), it is intended to break the natural flow of screen expectations. In the Richardson case, for example, it served as a way of transferring to TV the power of the aside to the theatre audience - trying to bring the audience at home into greater complicity with the character they were watching on screen.

So, be very cautious when using monologue material!

	Reply #8
Posted : 24/01/10
sihiggins 95 posts last on: 06/02/12 send private reply	Thank you all for all your comments!! Its funny because I actually posted that original message months ago! However, I am still in the same position so all your advice is most helpful. Thank you. Thanks again x

	Reply #9
Posted : 24/01/10
anonymous	I take the point about cheesy monologues, but (in my defense!) mine was for Reader's Digest, paid and it's what they wanted!! So onto the showreel it went! But yes, those awful "intense" to-camera pieces are generally to be avoided, I concur!

	Reply #10
Posted : 25/01/10
leeravitz 1543 posts last on: 20 hours send private reply	That's fair enough, Vanessa - I think there are no absolutely hard and fast rules about what footage you may gain that 'works', so long as it's well shot, preferably from a broadcast production and used effectively in the reel. But, of course, people can easily mistake the issue of including 'monologues' and it's well worth clearing the details up on a forum like this! And Si, I remember your original posting (which I think I replied to) - I just assumed the same question had been bumped back up for some reason. Ah, well...

Reply #10

Posted : 25/01/10

leeravitz
1543 posts
last on: 20 hours
send private reply

That's fair enough, Vanessa - I think there are no absolutely hard and fast rules about what footage you may gain that 'works', so long as it's well shot, preferably from a broadcast production and used effectively in the reel. But, of course, people *can* easily mistake the issue of including 'monologues' and it's well worth clearing the details up on a forum like this!

And Si, I remember your original posting (which I think I replied to) - I just assumed the same question had been bumped back up for some reason. Ah, well...

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