STEP 1
1. What Do You Want Your Reel To Look Like?
Design Demo: a.k.a. The PV Approach. We edit and design the demo to a rough draft for you, then you tweak it.
Mapped Demo: You design your demo, we edit it, then you tweak it.
This is Your Demo Reel! We love having the clients work with us, or if your are too busy, we can edit the reel without you and send you a version for approval!!
2. Choose Your Best Acting Scenes.
Go through all your work and select up to 8 of your best acting scenes. These scenes should represent your range and show you at your best.
Formats for Capturing Your Footage: We can digitize from mp4, mov, flv, Itunes, Blue Ray, Netflix Streaming, and DVD. We can download from Youtube and Vimeo.
2b. Hosting Clients Only.
Important: Please click here to view and download a .pdf file which goes into much more detail on how to prepare for a host reel. For more information about Reel Hosting you can contact us here.
3. Don’t Under Estimate Small Scenes!
Depending on where you are in your career, you may want to include any small scenes, one-liners on network TV or on film, and any student films that you’ve done. We may be able to tweak bad sound or video, so bring ’em!
4. Know where your scenes are on the Blue Ray, DVD, .mov or .mp4!
This is VERY important and will save you a lot of time and money!
5. Wrapping Your Package With Music.
Bring no more than 3 choices of music that describe you, your product, the image that you’re trying to sell. We will probably only use one as that helps with the packaging quality.
Having trouble deciding? Come up with three adjectives to describe yourself as an actor, then find a song that embodies these words. It can be old or new, with lyrics or without. If it does have lyrics, does it describe you, your attitude? Avoid Top-10 hits, as most people will learn to hate those songs in time.
STEP 2
It’s Easier Than You Think…
With The PV Approach, a design for your Demo Reel becomes apparent through hearing how you want to sell yourself, viewing all your material as it is digitized, and isolating key acting moments. The result is always unique to the actor and quite effective.
Because we edit on AVID and Final Cut X, the edit session is very creative and everything can be changed and tweaked until you are satisfied. You’ll never walk away unhappy. Sessions usually take between 2 to 4 hours.
Once the editing is done and you have approved it, we will make a 1080p HD, 720p HD or 480 SD depending on your needs. (Your files are left on the computer for about 6 months. Afterwards, it is archived.)
STEP 3
Why can’t I just bring my master in and add to it?
When you edit on a computer, your material is essentially 1s and 0s (digital data) and remains virtually unchanged from the source we started with.
When you come back in to re-do your Demo Reel, most places will ask you to bring in the originals and start from scratch so you won’t lose quality. This can be expensive, so some actors will just use their existing master HD. Well, now you’re losing slight quality going back into the computer, then slight quality going back out to a new master HD. All in all, your “slight” quality loss is adding up to a really ugly looking demo!
At Planet Video though, we archive your computer data (those 1s and 0s) onto at no charge. When you come back, we de-archive it for only $25.
How is De-Archiving Better?
Several ways.
1. It means you can re-edit your demo 3 weeks or 3 years after your last session!
2. It allows you to start right where we left off, move the scenes around, pull music out from under a scene, change the music all together, pull out old work and then digitize and add your new stuff!
3. It saves you time and money! No more lugging all your Originals back to the edit bay and starting from scratch every time you want to re-do your reel. And most importantly, NO QUALITY LOSS. When you call, just say you want to schedule a DE-ARCHIVING session.
Do You Charge to Archive My Demo?
Nope. Only when you want to de-archive. If you’ve edited with us before, odds are we have your demo archived. If you’re a PV Virgin, ask around. Check out other company samples, ask if they actually archive the computer data. Then, call us, so we can design you a kick-ass demo reel.