Please Crit My Demo Reel!

[traindog]

Hi, I am hoping if you have a spare couple of minutes to check out the first pass of my first showreel.
This is what I could come up with in my "spare time". I Don't seem to have much of it these days with a full time job, study and a travelling band.
Please crit and let me know whats good and bad. Thanks!

I am still cleaning up some of the animation (lip sync etc.) But just want some feedback on it so far so I can tweak it.

Also if anyone has any good advice on getting a nice smooth video export for web viewing at a fairly low file size I would be very grateful.

I used flash video for this test and it seems to skip a little bit.

You can see it HERE

[joojaa]

Too long! Otherwise its quite okay.

you should aim for a single long tv commercial length.

[traindog]

JooJaa, Tanks for havng a look! Yeah and I totally agree wih you..It is too long I am in the process of taking bits out (even the opening scene) and chopping it down quite a bit...then polishing the better parts left in there.
Thanks again.

[ptb]

This is about animation, right? You should point that out in your reel - perhaps as permanent text on the bottom (what project, your achievement in it etc.). What i don't like are some environments (the "sandscape", the bug on plate scene e.g.). Looks not very well done. Since it's about the characters you could consider making all the backgrounds black and white (maybe a bit blurry or even wireframe) and only the characters in color so that the focus is not on the irrelevant things (that are not so good and could question your good achievement in animation by pulling down the whole picture).

[traindog]

thanks PTB, thats great advice because it is about the animation. I made the environments to make the scene a little more interesting. I like the black and white idea. it makes sense to keep the eye on the animation.
I'll try it out..I appreciate the comments as this is just the test run and hopefully it will turn out alot better.

[rdunbar]

Looks FANTASTIC if you ask me!!!