Editing Showreel – How does it work ?

[Shane Ross]

[Shravan Ram] “Most editing showreels are a sequence of random clips from the various projects that the editor has worked on with some catchy music in the background (montage).”

If so, those are very POOR reels. That might work for DP reels, and production design, costumes. But editing reels need to have full scenes, with scene audio. Whoever is making reels like that won’t get taken seriously.

[Shravan Ram] “So it is more like you’re trying to create a music video with clips from all your projects to make them seem cohesive ? Is that the point ? Does the employer/whoever judge your editing skills based on this ?”

They can’t. Because those editing reels are poorly done. But no longer do we need the 5-7 min reel with small samples of our work. Now we can have full scenes, or acts…or entire shows…and post them on sites that can be demo reel sites, or on Vimeo. You can point potential clients/employers to all your clips, and they can choose what they want to watch. If you have a wide variety of work, they can choose to look at clips that best match the show they are trying to hire you for…instead of wading through footage that doesn’t match what they are doing.

[Shravan Ram] “Doesn’t this kind of a reel just show them WHAT kind of projects that you’ve worked on rather than HOW you work/edit ?”

Yup. And might be fine for the open tease of your reel…maybe 20-30 seconds. But then get to full scenes.

[Shravan Ram] “What if you’re a comedy/drama editor ?- Shouldn’t you be showing them a scene ( 2-3 mins long) ,a conversation between characters and the way you cut between them,etc ? “

Yup!

[Shravan Ram] “Or if you’re a documentary editor ? Shouldn’t you show them at least 5-10 minutes of continuous footage from the documentary you’ve edited for the employer to get a feel of your style of editing ?”

Yup!

Now, my demo site is down, because I relied on iWeb and mac.com, but they shuttered that. Since then I’ve dropped all my stuff on DropBox (because YouTUbe and Vimeo like to remove your stuff if it is a broadcast TV show, citing copy write issues. And then when employers ask, I send links to 4-5 things that are up their alley.

But I really need to get a new site up. Maybe. Once you are in this game long enough, people go by word of mouth and recommendations…less on reel. But starting out, a reel is needed.

Shane
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[Jp Pelc]

Honestly the only editing reels I’ve ever really watched were from fellow students of mine in college, and yes they were mostly just music video style montages of all these pieces that they worked on, which I never really understood. It would seem to me that much longer reels that show the choices you made would be much better.

I believe one year during the Oscars when they listed the nominations for best editor they did a cool thing where they would play a clip and show 3 or 4 small windows displaying all the angles the editor had to chose from, then a big window above would show which angle s/he was choosing at that specific time. I felt like it was a pretty cool way to quickly show the editor’s decisions