Aaron Marcus breaks down demo reel structure: keep the whole thing to one to one-and-a-half minutes, since casting directors decide in 15 seconds whether to keep watching. Individual clips should run 10-15 seconds, long enough to finish a scene's beat while keeping focus on you, not other actors.
Welcome to my Acting and Modeling Quick Tips series with me, Aaron Marcus. It's really important to know about your video reel, and one of the questions that people have is how many clips should you have and how long should each clip be on the reel? Well, here's, here's the thing. There really is no magic number as to how many to have. I can tell you that typically You don't want your actor's reel to be longer than a minute, maybe a minute and a half tops. But the reality is anybody who's going to be watching it, whether it's a casting director, director, producer, writer, agent, manager, they're going to know in 15 seconds whether there's something there of real interest for them. So typically, like I said, it's going to be between a minute and a minute and a half. And as far as how long each clip should be, you know, you've got to finish out the scene. You want to make sure that the scene is about you and not somebody else in the scene. So I would say, you know, typically you're looking at, you know, 15 seconds, 10 to 15 seconds for each clip. But, you know, the most important thing is to make sure that you are showing yourself, you are showing emotion. in a way that are believable, that are interesting, and that show a variety of things that you can do. So instead of just thinking of a specific number as far as how long each piece should be, I would say really I would be thinking more in the lines of how long does it need to be in order to show off your talent. I've got an incredible online workshop about how to create an effective demo reel. I'll be interviewing Dave Manship, who is the owner of Edit Plus. It's a great, great website. To get more information, just click on the link below. I know this is going to be incredibly helpful to you. If you do have any additional questions, always feel free to go to my facebook.com/howtomodel page, or just go to my page, How to Model, Looking forward to talking with you soon. I'm Aaron Marcus.
