Do You Need a Showreel?
I’m going to keep this one brief.
No. But you do need something.
In the 11 years I have been working as a filmmaker, I have only ever once made a showreel.
No job or film fund has ever been given to me because of a showreel.
Showreels make sense if you are an actor showing a range of different scenes and characters to quickly convey your diversity, but when clients are looking for filmmakers, they are not looking for range, they are looking for specialisms.
You might create bespoke showreels that you include in a pitch deck, i.e. you create a showreel purely of car footage when you are pitching to a car brand so they think ‘oh yeah their thing is cars’, but when a client sees a mash of wildlife, cars, sports, short films, comedy, horror, etc. etc. all it does is confuse them.
So what has constantly landed me work?
Word-of-mouth and recommendations always sit at the top of 'how I got a job', but outside of that, it is not the single showreel I made once many years ago, it is the complete short films.
One short film that leaves people feeling like they have experienced something and want to share it with their friends and colleagues will always trump a pretty showreel with no emotion or story.
Most of my work has come about from clients seeing one of my short films in full and thinking ‘that emotive feeling, I want customers to feel that when they watch a video about my brand’.
You want to make a film that will really hit the heart strings or makes someone laugh or brings a feeling of joy, and spread it far and wide.
To prove my point, below is the film that landed me an opportunity to direct a commercial for the Royal Navy. It wasn’t my showreel, it was this film.
By all means make a showreel if you want to, but in my experience, a showreel is really something you make for you, to make yourself feel good and have a little ego boost. The real rewards come from putting in the hard work of making one complete project, whether it be documentary or fiction, that leaves someone feeling changed.
