The "Reel" Deal / Reusable Art (Spoiler Alert: Lights, Lenses, and LEGO)

Behold! The plastic selfie.

Recently, I realized that I had enough accumulated completed projects for a video demo reel.  Soon after, I realized that much of the aforementioned footage had been either lost or archived away on several CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, in one of many CD wallets, on a bookshelf or in a box.

In lieu of being my own archaeologist, I took whatever footage I could easily find from nearby external hard drives, streaming websites, and some neat test footage from Disney California Adventure -- and I created my very own video production reel:


After editing that reel, I noticed that I hadn't been very focused in what I've produced.  In the above-embedded reel, there are clips from cartoons I attempted to animate nearly three years ago.  There are music videos and promo clips from the previous decade (which, surprisingly, isn't the 1990s).  There are also more recent multi-camera event videos.

I could have then re-edited my reel into maybe an animation-only one or a promo clip-only one.  Instead, I compiled a reel for my music work, which includes collaborations with my brother Jon:


The music demo reel is longer than the video reel.  I actually like my music reel better than my video reel.  As much as I enjoy creating with digital video as the medium, I love making music even more.  I have been fortunate enough to be hired as the composer for some great films, which is probably why writing and producing music for film/video is such a wonderful experience for me.

Back to reality:  Who knows if the above-embedded reel will snag me any more dream gigs.  As evidence that I might suffer from career attention-deficit disorder, I edited together a demo reel for my work in audio production and postproduction:


I anticipate that my various skills in audio might be useful to other production houses and upcoming projects (probably not the voice-over part, though).  I must confess that rescuing audio is tedious work, but if that sort of skill set can get some nice-paying gigs, I will gladly scrub away at waveforms and whatnot.

Thanks for reading my rant-like reminiscence of a weblog.  Now I'd like to show you my "portfolio" of macro mode, point-and-shoot "photography" of LEGO minifigures.  I am not good at building detailed LEGO models, so I make things simple and usually blurry in the background.  Here are a few "pieces" from 2011:

Greedo never shoots first.

Zombie apocalypses are cool.

The prototypical plastic selfie.

 

Here is some of my "work" from 2013:

Sam and Dean Winchester as FBI Agents Bonham and Jones.

The 11th, 9th, and 10th Doctors, with the Empty Child and the TARDIS in the background.

Yours truly, regenerated.  LEGO finally released medium dark flesh-colored hands (perhaps ironically) with Johnny Depp's "Tonto" minifigure.

As much as I love creating music, I am currently enamored with using lighting and lens lengths to capture configurations of plastic bricks and tiny figurines.  Perhaps I could use some video...