This has clearly been making the rounds, so it’s likely that you’ve already had the pleasure, but I can’t resist linking it to it here.
The piece features video and auto-tuned dialog of Carl Sagan from his amazing series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, mashed-up into a melancholy, downtempo, new-age, retro music video with just enough (or perhaps not enough) tongue in cheek. Finally, auto-tune use to be proud of!
The piece was produced by John Boswell. More about him and his music is available on his site. He has also made a download of the track and the video available here.
Josh Clos produced this documentary short about the GMS recently. He and his colleagues Julie Kistler and Brian Smith shot video during my performance in Downtown Minneapolis with Minneapolis Art on Wheels on May 13, 2009. Later Josh interviewed me in the audio studio at Art Institutes Minnesota where I teach interactive media and audio production. As a student in my audio production class, Josh edited the sound and video together with minimal input from myself. His short illustrates what the GMS does and how I’ve been using it to compose music in real-time. Thanks, Josh, for a job well done!
Speaking of the GMS, I have recently slowed down its development, and I’m considering releasing a beta version of the application in a few months. Soon afterward I plan to release the code as Open Source so that the application can be developed further by artists interested in creating music through gestural input.
So I finally did something I should have done years ago: make a sound design demo reel. I’ve always had my work available online to view, but never as a collage of all my best work. I was naive to think that potential employers and clients would take the time to view multiple examples of my work. I’d be lucky if they viewed just ONE video in full. So as I set out to make my reel, I decided to do some research first. As expected, I only found guidelines for visual/graphic demo reels. While there are certain tips that apply to all demo reels, audio reels obviously need their own criteria. So I watched as many sound design reels as my ears could handle and came up with a list of helpful guidelines. My hope is that other sound designers will read this article and add their own guidelines to the comments. From there we can compile a master list and make it available to everyone on Audio Cook Book.
The first thing that I discovered was that making a sound design demo reel sucks. Sucks hard. I think its much more difficult to make an audio reel than a visual one. You can’t demonstrate your skills with quick edits of 5 second clips being backed up by a song by your favorite artist. You have to make more considerations in your edits because you’re dealing with audio as well. You also have to show longer clips to let the sound design develop and be heard in context. In my research I noticed a lot of similarities and tried to implement the ideas I liked into mine. Here are some simple guidelines to consider for your sound design demo reel:
1. Start off with your best work.
It would be a small victory if a potential employer or client actually viewed your demo reel. Don’t waste any time. Hook them right away. If you start off with a bang, they’ll feel more inclined to keep watching. This doesn’t mean you should put your worst work last. You should still end with something that will stand out in their ears. In my case, my first and last clips are different sections of the same piece of work.
2. Keep it short.
The first edit of my reel was over 7 minutes long. The second edit was 5 and half minutes. My final edit came in just under 4 and half minutes. I’m a sound designer myself and even I was getting bored watching other reels that went over 3 minutes. Imagine what it must be like for an employer who has to sit through hundreds. Don’t waste your time making it any longer than 4 and half minutes. You want as much of your reel to get viewed as possible. If you wanted, you could make a longer version which you can reference at the end of your shorter reel. I was going to do that, but let me tell you how sick I was of working on this thing after the short version was done.
Note: Animation geniuses PIXAR have their own guidelines for aspiring employees. One of them demands that their demo reels not exceed 4 mins. Oddly enough, they turn down the volume and do not listen to ANY audio.
3. Don’t worry about content.
Some sound designers who are just getting started might not have a large collection of work. Don’t sweat it. Use what you have. If your demo reel consists of three 1 minute clips…so be it. It still displays what you’re capable of. Don’t let your lack of content prevent you from making a reel. If you’re worried about not having enough, you can always take a scene from a favorite movie or download a silent film from the internet archive and redo the sound design. A lot of people do this. It’s great for keeping your chops up as well.
4. Label Everything.
One thing I noticed in almost all the reels I watched…every clip was labeled with the designer’s responsibilities. You want to make what you did very clear. You don’t want to be associated for something you haven’t done and you don’t want to look like you’re intentionally being misleading. Labeling everything eliminates all confusion and highlights your abilities.
5. You are more than just a Sound Designer.
If you’re a sound designer you’re almost always an audio editor as well. There is a good chance you’re doing everything sound related on some of your work. Make sure to label things like Foley Artist, Recording Engineer, VO record, ADR, mixing engineer, music editor, and music supervisor to your responsibilities list. These are legit credits…you’ve earned them.
6. Think about Order.
Take a look at all your work that could be included in your reel. How do you want to be viewed? In my case, I have a lot of sound design experience with animation, but I don’t necessarily want to be pigeon-holed as such. Take notice of the feel and flow of your work, you’ll be surprised what shapes you can make by playing around with the order you present them in.
7. Use Transitions to your advantage.
If you’re tasked with editing together your own demo reel, use this as an opportunity to show off your audio editing abilities by creating interesting and creative transitions between clips on your reel. Use long reverb tails, pitch audio up/down and overlap it with the next clip’s key, stretch/speed up the ends of clips to transition into the next clip’s tempo or bring audio from the next clip in early and then cut the video at an appropriate time that coincides with the soundtrack. This also creates a more cohesive viewing experience.
8. Give Credit.
Make sure to list any affiliations, agencies, directors, or producers that helped make the material on your reel. This is just the courteous thing to do and you’d be surprised at the negative response that can occur if someone was not given credit or the credits were manipulated to mislead. If you worked on something at another company or production house, make sure to label this as well. I know it might not seem important since you’re showcasing YOUR work, but it looks good and shows potential employers that you’ve worked with a wide range of companies, clients, and directors.
9. Check your Levels (ah duuuuur)
This one is pretty obvious, but unfortunately I’ve seen some pretty bad demo reels. Treat your reel like a project. Check all your levels, mix everything together, and master accordingly. Don’t leave out any details. The sound professionals looking at your reel have been in the business longer than you and they’ve been working with audio longer than you. They’ll be able to hear everything.
10. Get Feedback
This one I’m really glad I did. Your reel will probably contain work that’s been with you for years. You might even be sick of some of it and can’t decipher if what you’re doing is any good. Get a fresh perspective by showing your reel to friends, family, and other audio colleagues before you publish it. Ask them about the content in the reel, the order of the content, the length, feel, etc. You’d be amazed what you’ll find out. I showed my rough cut to my girlfriend and after viewing came up with an entirely different order for the clips. I ended up borrowing almost all of her suggestions and it made for a much better reel. Thanks Lady!
11. Render.
Do your research and figure out the best way to encode your videos for quality and online streaming. I exported my videos to uncompressed, widescreen avis in Sony Vegas (using a project size of 1280 x 720 and a pixel aspect ratio of 1.000) I then opened my avis in Quicktime and exported to 1280 x 720 HD H.264 quicktime videos. The H.264 codec comes highly recommended by Vimeo and allows you to have great looking HD videos optimized for streaming. The audio was Linear PCM at 48l/24bit. DO NOT render your audio as anything less than full quality because that would be stupid.
12. Move it
Upload your reel and start posting the hell out of it. Post it to online job profile sites, your social network sites, emails to production companies, prospective employers, artists whose work you appreciate, etc. Do not sit and wait because nobody is coming. You need to take the initiative and get your reel out there.
Well, that’s about all I have. I hope this was informative. I’ve included my demo reel here so you can see these tactics in action. Like I said, I’m really curious to hear how other sound designs went about making their reels. Please leave a comment with your tips and tricks and we can keep improving on this list.
Hello ACB readers! My name is Kyle Vande Slunt and I’m a sound designer living in Minneapolis, MN. I’ve been a big fan of ACB for sometime and John has graciously allowed me to contribute. I look forward to posting more sounds and articles and hearing your feedback. Its great to meet all of you.
Back in November 2008 I was commissioned by the Open Eye Figure Theater in Minneapolis to create sound design for a new work by Michael Sommers entitled “Snowman”. The play was a sound designers dream: a magical fable told through people, puppets, animations, multiple projections, and some “LOST” like magic. The goal was to create an entire world of ambiances, sounds, and transitions that belonged to this snowy world that my have existed in the past or possibly in the far future.
Doubling as the show’s audio engineer, I had to devise a way to trigger (perform) all of these sounds and the recorded musical score for each performance. Normally in smaller theaters, this feat is accomplished by putting everything onto a playable CD or loaded into QLab (a popular Mac based sound program for theater). For Snowman however, I needed to be able to trigger all of these elements and have them be completely independent of each other for layering, mixing, and effects purposes. And in some cases these elements needed to be triggered very quickly.
The solution: I loaded all of my audio clips (sfx, loops, music, etc) into a highly organized Ableton Live session (see picture) and assigned MIDI notes to trigger the clips. In Live you can only assign one note to a clip, so each clip had to be a different note on the keyboard. So I went through and logically mapped the notes of the keyboard to the sounds and music for the show. I used black keys for music and the white keys for sound effects and ambiances, labeling each key with electoral tape and a description. As you can see in the picture, I used only white and yellow tape. Anything more saturated in hue would have been impossible to read in the dark booth. The white tape is MIDI channel 1 and the yellow tape is MIDI channel 2. (I switched MIDI channels instead of octaves to avoid labeling hassles.) Each channel of audio was then assigned to my BCF-2000 where I had mixing control for every track using multiple fader
banks. The BCF’s knob banks came in handy for sending the audio to return tracks for real-time effect manipulation.
Each show felt like a performance where I was jamming away on my weird Snowman keyboard while layering and effecting sounds at the same time. Just for fun I’ve included a small collage of some of the sounds from the show. Enjoy!
