Guillaume Jallon - Demo reel

The big picture

My demo reel was composed of several projects made during my time at Animation Mentor, but I thought of it as one big project to impress recruiters and find my dream job. To make it captivating, I approached each assignment as an opportunity to tell engaging stories rather than mere exercises. I aimed for a balanced mix of emotions, ensuring that each sequence stood out in its own unique way.

Among them, one of my favorite was the thrilling "Alien sequence," reminiscent of Helen Ripley's adrenaline-filled escapades in tight corridors from the first Alien movie.

The Alien Sequence

I tried to come in this class as prepared as I could be. I found out what were the requirements before it started. The most important one was the max length of each shot, as we want to focus on quality over quantity, and to avoid any potential resistance for the sequence I had in mind! 

This whole thing was a hard sell! In addition to the quite lengthy sequence, mentors discouraged excessive focus on camera work. I also had some additional characters when we were supposed to only use one character for every shot. So I kept their screen time as little as possible. I also needed to put some time in the environment which, again, was not required from animation students.

With these requirements/limitations in mind, my first submission of the class was the sequence's entire script, a pre-visualization pass, some renders to give an idea of the scene's vibe and also the reference for the first shot! I wanted to send this message to my mentor : "Trust me, I can do this". And he did! He loved the idea and green-lit the entire thing that first week!

Here is the pre-visualization I sent :

These are the Arnold's renders I did to sell the mood of the scene:

Arnold renders are never required in class, but since I wanted to convey a specific vibe to my story, I needed these creepy shadows and dark areas that could hide potential dangers!

During the 3 months animating the different shots of that sequence, I kept improving the environment, working out issues with the renders and improved the camera in order to deliver the best work I could. All the preparation before hand and trying to go extra the extra mile in different aspects of 3D Animation worked out amazingly! Here is the final result:

The other shots

"The Alien" impressed my mentor so much that he contacted me right after the class to convince me to finish all the classes so I can apply to his company! I originally planned on stopping after the next class and not focus on acting much more, as I wanted to work on video games, but this email changed my life!

Determined after my success with the previous sequence, I really tried to craft a diverse demo reel. My next shot was "The coward", which was used to teach us acting. For this, I wanted to focus on the face more than anything, and so decided to have a character that would barely move. I also wanted to show the viewers something quite different from most animation student works! And I got a voice line from my favorite Star Trek DS9 episode, Duet, that fitted the bill perfectly! I wanted viewers to empathize with a character, but doing so with a war criminal is quite different!

Thanks to this barebone idea, I did not have to spend much time on body mechanics or camera or anything. This was my first submission for this shot and it was already working quite well! I usually had a much more difficult posing my characters for the first assignment!

From there, I had 6 weeks to polish the end of the shot. Thanks to all the nit-picky notes I had about his face, I was able to create a shot that I love!

Now that I had a "sad" shot, I could focus on some more fun stuff! So I went for the funny interaction between two prisoners escaping, and the very last shot done in class was about a fun character that wants to hook you into a story full of mysteries, and hopefully, also hook you into checking out the rest of the reel!

Thanks to all these shots, I had the diverse demo reel I wanted from the start, and it worked wonders! I managed to find a job with it pretty early on after graduating. I hope you enjoyed the deep dive in the mind set I had through Animation Mentor!