Creating Professional Showreels from Scratch that Casting Directors Want To See

I first got into making showreels from scratch by accident. I’d always been good at making short films rapidly (often finishing them the same week I wrote them). Meanwhile, my actor-friends were sitting around for two, sometimes three years, waiting to get material back from directors.

Friends began calling me up and saying “Hey Dan, I still don’t have any material, could you shoot me something?” So I started writing scenes specifically for them and then we would film them.

And then friends of my friends started getting in touch, and at this point, I was doing it for free! So naturally I began saying, “sure, I can do it, but can you give me a few quid because it’s a lot of work!”

The work ethic I’d always put into creating short films was paying off in a different way; I was becoming the guy that people would come to for showreel material.

I began asking myself things which I still ask today: What is a showreel? What is a GREAT showreel? How do actors succeed? How do actors fail? Am I showing a character, or showing the actor themselves, or both? 

It’s a mystery I am continually unravelling. The more time I spend working in this industry, the more I get to know people who are succeeding, be they actors or casting directors or agents. In fact, in recent weeks I was able to recommend some clients to an agency, and the agency took them on.

I feel like the middle man in an ongoing journey. What I aim to produce every time are short scripts that capture a piece of who you are and what you can do – and then I carefully direct you to bring out those performances.

My showreels from scratch service began quite successfully because I have always been pretty adept at putting a decent scene together. But it’s excelled even more so in recent years because I have become more aware of what good acting is and how it happens.

 

Great #showreel top tips from @danieljohnsonuk here http://t.co/dalkVSPuCP Excellent advice!

— Annie Rowe (@AnnieRoweCasts) May 7, 2015

Recently, clients have been saying to me; “that was more relaxing than I expected,”  and “that was easier than I thought it should be” – and for me, these are great things to hear, because that’s how it should be.

There are all these buzzwords that float around in actors minds, like ‘casting type’, ‘my brand’, etc – but I try to go beyond that and to create scenes with humanity, that put a piece of who you are up on the screen. I think that’s important whether you’re in a sweet rom-com scene or you’re playing an axe-murderer. I try to tone down the ‘acting’ and tone up the feeling that we’re watching a real person react to real moments.

The actors I recommended to the agency a few weeks back were clients who I think are natural – whose reels showcase people we believe in, and it’s no surprise they got picked up.

I asked myself this week: what is it that I do? When any business endeavour gets successful, it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re doing.

Here’s the best way I can explain it: There are many very, very talented actors around. But getting good material is so tough, for a plethora of reasons (which I’ll address shortly). One of the biggest concerns for actors is that the material they have of their acting doesn’t match up with the level of craft they have now reached.

Here’s the thing:

If you’re professionally trained,
And you’ve worked on your craft,
And you’ve been working for many years…

Then you probably feel you should have good material.

BUT, often you don’t:

Because you’ve been doing heaps of stage work recently,
Because you paused your career to do other stuff,
Because a director has been promising to send you rushes for six years.

What I do is fix this problem.

And I’d like to think I do more than fix a problem. My aim is to understand you; to know who you are and what you’re about — which enables me to write scenes that will allow you to do that thing, to show that talent nobody else has seen yet.

The importance of showreels cannot be underestimated. Every actor I know who gets work, has a solid showreel. I’d like to help you create one.

 

 

 

Information on my Acting Showreels Service

Email Me: dj@danieljohnsonfilms.co.uk

Twitter: @DanielJohnsonUK