Brown Blog Films

When applying for a job within animation it is crucial you have a good portfolio or showreel. But what makes a portfolio or showreel stand out I hear you ask? Here are a few pointers to help you on your way and get your work noticed.

Simplicity
Keep it simple and well edited. Always put your best work forward. Don’t have 200 images in a portfolio, select the best ones as we can judge your ability in less than 20 pieces. If you have enough material for a Showreel, it’s always best to keep it short (less than 5 minutes) and only use your best work. If we want to see more, we will ask you at interview stage.

Style/Theme
If you have a particular style and the bulk of your work is consistent, that’s great, but the general consensus is that it’s better to have a variety of different styles in your portfolio. That said, it’s important that you still maintain a structure and not just have a random muddle of idea’s and designs. It’s good to have a thought process behind them, from character design, tonal boards, to how the characters look in a background and in story boards. All these aspects must complement each other and as a result solidify the entire theme. By showing you have a variety of styles it shows your range and that you are able to adapt to whatever project they will be working on and keep the overall animation piece coherent.

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Be Critical.
Try not to be nostalgic about an image as it is not necessarily your best work. Always ask the opinion of someone you trust will give an honest assessment of your work. Generally this does not include family or friends as they will always more than likely say your stuff is “Amazing” regardless if it is or not.

Make it relevant
Remember always make your portfolio relevant to the position you are applying for. There is no point showing a company 20 character designs when applying for a technical director position.

The review process
Once we receive a portfolio/showreel or CV, we will send an email to confirm that we received it, we keep all portfolios/showreels and CV’s on file for 6 months. We only look at portfolios if we are recruiting and regret that due to time constraints we cannot give individual feedback. If we feel your portfolio has potential we will get in touch with you for an interview.

Never submit something that you want returned such as original artwork or your only copy of a digital file as we do not return portfolios or showreels. It’s also important that when sending digital files that they play on the computer easily, we will not look at .EXE (Executable) files or any less obvious file extension. Jpegs, Tiffs, Quicktimes etc are all perfectly welcome files.

From time to time, please feel free to check back by email to see if we have reviewed your portfolio/showreel. By the nature of animation production, when we hire, it tends to be for a large production so we could be quickly looking to hire an additional 20 staff. But in-between the larger productions, recruitment tends to be slower which is why you may not hear back from us about an interview.

We get a large volume of portfolios/showreels and CV’s sent to us so it’s really important that you only submit your work to jobs@brownbagfilms.com as there is a good chance it will not be included in the system if you send it to any individual within the company.

Brown Bag Films depends on your creativity and talent to produce the work that we do and we really hope that these few pointers help you as you prepare to submit a portfolio or showreel to us.