Creating The Perfect Demo: Pt. 1

Posted by Matt

October 30, 2007

My partner in sound quit a few weeks ago which left with the arduous task of trying to replace him. He was very talented at so many things and a pleasure to work with for so many years but it was back to the drawing board as far as trying to fill his shoes.

Since I am once again getting an influx of demos, I thought this would be a good time to explain what (I think) a good demo is and hopefully increase your chances of getting that dream gig!

Please Note: When I write the word “I” or “Me”, I am talking about the proverbial “Me” - that person out there that has to filter thru all the demos. This is person you need to please.

1) Have a website. Have a clean website with samples that are in an easy to listen/view format. Your MySpace page does not count. Those pages are not for people who take their craft seriously. There is way too much distraction going on with a page like that.
2) Your samples should play in the same page that the link is on. Be careful of putting in links to quicktimes. When you navigate away from the page, even to play the file, it is too easy to get distracted and move onto the next thing.
3) Since you now have the sample playing on the same page as the link you can - listen close, this is BIG one - write a description of what you actually did for that track/video. I have listened to so many tracks that were undocumented and I had no idea what the person actually did. The is especially important for score to picture when their is speech, mixing, foley, ADR, scoring, sound fx, etc. If you don’t document it, I assume someone else did it.
4) File Sizes: Be VERY careful here. even though most people are on broadband, that doesn’t mean I want to download your 150 meg quicktime video. In fact, I probably won’t and I will move on to the next candidate. I recommend uploading your file to YouTube and then embedding the code in your page so it plays right on your site. If you have to have a larger quicktime (lets face it, most YouTube videos look like crap) definately have a small streaming version that can be embedded in your page and then link (with the file size in the link name) to the higher quality one so the person has the option of seeing the great looking one.

I will end this segment here and pick up where I left off next time, but I want to stress this: The important thing is to have a clean page with minimal distractions and an easy way to pass information from the page to the viewer. The information is the descriptions, audio and video.

I have applied most of these things on this site when posting my videos. There is always room for improvement, but take a look around and hopefully you will agree that I have focused on “ease of entry” where it comes to just being able to click play on something that looks interesting and getting back some pretty timely feedback.

Until next time…

The Business of Sound