What are some of the best practices for organizing and presenting your visual effects portfolio?

1. Select Your Best Work 2. Diverse Showreel 3. Include Process Work 4. Organize by Categories 5. Professional Presentation 6. Provide Context 7. User-Friendly Navigation 8. Keep It Updated 9. Engage with Your Audience 10. Seek Feedback 11. Leverage Online Platforms 12. Include Testimonials (if applicable)

You'll hear this advice over and over again, but the importance of keeping your reel short cannot be overstated. Recruiters and hiring managers are busy people, and while they're usually interested to see your work, a reel that is even a few seconds longer than it needs to be feels like an imposition on their time. Long shots can be a challenge to include in a reel if the story they're telling or the focal points of the shot are spread out in time. Consider showing just a section of a longer shot, even if it's impressive as a whole. Viewers will tune out after 60 - 90 seconds, so devoting 25 seconds of a reel to one shot sacrifices a lot of their attention.

To create a strong VFX portfolio, curate only your best work and highlight your specific contributions. Keep your showreel short, around 1-2 minutes, showcasing the most impressive shots first. Include project breakdowns to demonstrate your technical process, and organize your work by category or project for easy navigation. Host your portfolio on an online platform, ensuring it's mobile-friendly and fast-loading. Personal projects can highlight creativity, and clear contact details are essential. Update your portfolio regularly and maintain a professional presentation, including testimonials or awards for added credibility.

Choosing your best work is essential. When you’re watching a film in theatres and everything is well done you’ll be fascinated and wondered by the visual effects. But when something is not well done, a character creates this uncanny valley feeling then you’ll point it out quickly. The same happens when a recruiter or a supervisor watches your reel. Unfortunately your level will be set by the lowest quality. So try to raise the bar. We all know that nostalgic feeling from that shot you did in college or in your personal project with your friends, but if it’s not spectacular and eye candy it will only lower your chances to be called for an interview.

When editing your showreel try to focus on including the work that matches the job. Let’s say you’re a generalist and now you want to apply to an fx position. Focus on showing your fx work more. If you don’t have enough material yet is good to show for example lighting skills or other related skills but focus more on your goal. And in terms of timeline of the reel, try to organize the material in a way that you show your best shots right in the beginning and end of the reel. You can leave the rest in the middle. This will catch their attention right from frame one and have the gotcha moment in the end. Again remember to not use bad material, tests or rnd. If you have a lot of technical material do a separate tech demoreel.

Some Visual Effects role positions are quite specific and showing too much variety in a reel cannot be the best option. If the position you are after is that specific, consider making a reel focused on that type of position(for example, a film Layout reel, or a reel about games UI) Once there, organization can help but making an impressive edition can be help, too.

Eject everything that isn’t your absolute best work. Too often artists build their reels around hitting a certain quantity or wanting to highlight earlier work. This just drags your portfolio down and makes us wonder if you recognize if that old work is weak or not. Besides, hiring managers don’t want to spend 10 minutes watching your reel anyway. 2 minutes tops. Your best work. Kill everything else with fire.

If you worked on large-scale VFX shots as part of a team, it's helpful to put a discreet note at the bottom of the screen stating what you contributed to the shot. This is particularly the case for 3D and Generalist roles -- the person reviewing your reel doesn't want to make assumptions about what you did (and didn't) do for a shot that was clearly worked on by 15 people. A simple statement in white text does the trick: "cloth simulation for hero characters" or "background environment" for example.

Make your reel exciting. It is important to create a reel that makes you feel you want more, that it ended too soon. This is an exciting reel. To do that, make sure that you control the rythms and the pace of your reel. Music is very important and helpful. Try to avoid the average music of the moment on most VFX reels, (like reels) of make sure it adds this great awsome feeling, but more important, make sure that if you silence the audio, the reel keeps being exciting! (many recruiters check the reels without audio, and many artists have a reel that lacks punch without it)