Now that I have gotten motion tracking/matchmove out of the way and understand how it works I have spent the past few days looking at various showreels from Escapees (the graduates from Escape studios) although they are masters level students this is a viable research option as it allows me to work out what should be included in a showreel and how long it should be. Something I found interesting was that the overall time differs from 1 minute to 2 minutes with 1:30 being approximately the average time for a reel. These usually involve a shot that lasts a short amount of time before a breakdown of the shots to show how it was constructed.
Each video seems to follow a similar pattern, each starts with a title card containing the artist’s contact details and what role they are training/showing skills for.
Something that is also important is that the music throughout the reels can be muted without detracting from the viewing as none of the footage relies on audio.
Each reel shows the final product first, then there is the breakdown, starting with the original plates, matte layers and first composite, followed by a series of corrections and finally the final composite.
The reels have more than one scene, from what I can gather it is to show that the artist can work with a variety of scenes rather than just the one location, it also allows for seeing whether or not the environment dictates how the artist would work.
And finally to end we have another contact card, sometimes with additional information or where it was made, in this case being Escape Studios.