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Tech Tips
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VASCO NUNESNunes’ passion for documentaries brought widespread attention with the release of the rock documentary DiG! that led to his current work on Planet B-Boy (about breakdancing competitions) and his next projects, The History of Jamaican Music and the documentation of Lollapalooza.
MATT UHRYAfter studying sculpture at the University of Colorado, Uhry made the leap to filmmaking, working menial jobs to save up for an Aaton. These days, Uhry shoots mostly commercials and music videos and tries to do about one feature per year, most recently completing work on the action/comedy Graduation.
DEVIN MANNAn agent at Innovative Artists, Mann guides the careers of numerous cinematographers, including Jonathan Sela, Roberto Schaefer and Tim Ives. He employs a hands-on approach to creating his clients’ demo reels and is generally known to distribute some of the most intriguing ones in the industry. |
UHRY: It was really expensive in the days when we had to do 3/4”s. That cost a lot of money. They were about $15 each. Fortunately, I’m pretty good with editing. I remember having to borrow some equipment and it involved a transaction of, like, a case of beer and some labor cleaning out someone’s gutters, just to sort of get all the equipment to do it. Now, I can do it all on my computer and I don’t have to worry about it.
MANN: Let’s say someone has lots of corporate commercials but they want to do more beauty. We’ll say, “Why don’t we pull all the beauty shots that you’ve done in your commercials and your films and your music videos and make 60-second montage out of them. Maybe you’ve got a Dido video and a Britney Spears and some other famous female acts and you can use that to give someone a sense of how you can do beauty.” I know one client that we did this for and now he’s doing beauty 40% of the time.
UHRY: Having spots that directors and producers recognize as something that actually aired matters more than having an amazing commercial for Japan that involved an incredible shot and helicopter chases if they don’t recognize it. I did an ad for Zantec that had great cinematography, but it’s maybe not an interesting product category. Whereas, if you do something for Nike that’s mediocre, it’s considered cooler and more impressive because of the product association. I can’t even pretend to understand the reasoning for that.
NUNES: You may not always be able to pay somebody $1,000 to update your website or your reel. I have editing facilities at my disposal because I have a production company. If I need to do a quick reel for somebody, I can make a reel that just shows the four scenes I want them to see.
MANN: People have to spend time and resources on it. It’s the most important thing they can do for their career. The DPs who make their own reels bring them in here and half of them don’t work because they don’t do a quality check on it, which is frustrating. [To perfect them], we go to a place called Post and Beam and another place called Copy Write.
UHRY: The reel is not an artistic statement. It’s something that’s supposed to sell you and get you jobs. My reel is split into two sides—commercial and music video. There are eight spots on it right now. If you don’t have between six and eight things to show, then that’s a little suspect. And if you have more than that, you can’t show too much. My agent picks the order, I burn the reels, bounce those off of him, then he labels them and sends them out and makes the follow-up call.
NUNES: Mine is divided into four pieces: feature/narratives, music videos, commercials and live performance. The very first thing that shows up is just my name and the four sections, so it’s very easy [to navigate]. A lot of people have two reels: One for narrative work and one for commercial/music videos, but I don’t. You can send it out and say, “Just go to the narrative section.” I also have a montage at the end of my music video/commercial area, where all the music videos that I didn’t think were that great as a whole, but they had good photography, can be found. If I need to showcase beauty shots or special techniques or a specific type of look, I’ll put it in that montage. Also, because I work with many musicians, I can take elements of my work from long-form EPKs or documentaries and put it to a track of their music. You’re effectively saying, “I have specific photographic qualities that I know how to achieve in music videos and I can get it done for you.” That way, you move yourself closer to doing that music video or commercial work that you want to do.
UHRY: I have a very good relationship with my agent, Steve Jakobs. My theory is: He’s selling it. If I trust him and I feel like I’ve told him where I’m at creatively and who I am artistically, then he can make those interpretations to the market of what can sell. I had this spot on the end of my reel that’s for the Nature Conservancy. It’s an incredible piece. A lot of my director friends (have said), “I love that. You should open your reel with that” and Steve said, “Oh, you should probably take that off because you’ve never been put up for a job that looked anything like that in the last three years.”
MANN: Every reel that goes out, we’ve approved—which can mean a variety of things because we have resumes that go with it, we have a menu that goes with it, there’s a layout, the pictures that are chosen for it. It all has to be approved. Our clients are so close to their work and they remember how hard it was to achieve that shot or how difficult or great a shoot was and they might be sentimental or passionate about a project. That’s wonderful, but it’s great to have an outside, trained perspective, saying, “I know you’re attached to this spot, but it’s not really working for your reel” or “It’s not as current as it needs to be” or “We need to do something differently with it.” You need to be able to see the versatility of their work: The beautiful exteriors, interiors, beauty—that’s relevant to that person’s work—you know, automobiles, etc. We’ll often do juxtapositions of exterior and interior, black/white and color, to give a sense of the variety of work that they can do. Also, instead of just lining up 10 commercials back-to-back that you’re not necessarily proud of, let’s put some music over it, and some sound design or silence or rain in the background. As long as it’s complementing the visual and catches the viewer’s attention.
UHRY: Probably only 10% of the people who download my site (www.fuzby.com) in its entirety are industry people who might hire me at some point. But the website is very valuable. I have a reel for Europe that’s created in PAL because that was the only way people there could see it. With the website, they can just click on it and watch it while you’re actually talking to them on the phone. There are maybe 40 different QuickTime movies on my site.
NUNES: I have a website (www.vasco.fm) that I update with new projects. It allows you to have a bio that gives people an overview of what you’ve done. It also lets you showcase other work. You can update it all the time and it costs you less because websites nowadays are relatively cheap. On the other hand, there are places like reelsondemand.com, which are great, but tailored for commercial and music video work. You’re in the middle of a pool of talent, so people are not looking for you [specifically], they’re looking for the work.
MANN: We get calls from all over the world from people who want to see the reel NOW. We go to a place called sourcetv.com that hosts a bunch of our reels. Then we have a password and user name for each of these different reels, so that a prospective viewer can go directly to the person that we’re suggesting.
UHRY: There are people that you work with on a regular basis. In that case, the reel may be important to make the agency or the client feel at ease with me working on it.
NUNES: Everybody who hires me looks at my reel at some point. I would say that half of the projects that I’ve done in the last three years have come out of people looking at my reel without knowing who I was and half of them knowing me through word-of-mouth. They’ll say, “You’ve been recommended because you have certain qualities that we’re looking for and all I want to do is see your reel to see some of the work you’ve done beyond the more personal and managerial qualities that are necessary for a cameraman.”
MANN: It happens at least 50% of the time. We’re hitting people with reels all the time.
UHRY: It happens, without even a conversation with the director or anything. Just, “You’re hired. Show up here.”
