Demo Reel Advice (2)

[zali]

Hey everyone,
I'm just looking for a little advice, as I am working on putting together my demo reel to apply to school.
I was just wondering, how important is it to display good facial animation (lip sinc, etc.) over just using expression through body movement?
Should I be looking into including a piece of facial animation on my reel, or is it not necessary?

Thanks in advance for your opinions,

[nazgul]

Being totally biased FOR facial animation for a variety of reasons; I'd say facial stuff is good to show, but only if you have a worthwhile face to do it on.

One of the things I like to point out often , is that facial emotion -learning to convey acting and soul- can be much harder (in some ways) than pantomime, and does deserve a lot of time and study; acting vs. miming. We may remember the shots of Mike and Sully singing and dancing, but they became characters we love in close-ups.

My 2c. -J.

[richard-sher]

If I was doing the reel for fun, I would put more emphasis on body movement, but that is just because there is so much more that you can do with the body than you can do with just the face. However, there are not nearly as many great facial animators out there as there are character animators. If you want to help secure a future job, I would concentrate on facial animations as there are already too many character animators looking for work. (at the moment.)

Of course the ideal reel would have both great facial animation and great character animation.

[twedzel]

Could you perhaps give your definition of Character animator? I think perhaps you are grossly misusing the term (ie great facial animation is an element of great character aimation, they are not two seperate disiplines.)

[richard-sher]

Yes, I agree that facial animation is an aspect of character animation. What I meant was... that in many companies there are people that just do facial animation and others that do character "movement". (I was calling the "movement" animators "character animmators." I should have made it clear what I was talking about.

I'm not saying that one can not do both, but I don't know of any one that is equally good at both. It seems that there are a lot more people out there that concentrate on character movement than lip sync. That is why I think a lip synch animator will have an eaisier time getting a job.