My showreel on vimeo

Pasi Rutanen · January 7, 2013

Im a cinematographer based in Stockholm, Sweden. This is my showreel from 2012, looking to improve it and add newly shot projects aswell. Would love to have some input about pacing, shot selection and overall impression upon viewing. Thanks

Matthew W. Phillips · January 7, 2013

TBH, It looked to me like you need to work on properly exposing images. I'm all for artistic flair but you just down right blew out quite a few shots. Also, your framing was "interesting" in that you had quite a few shots with the subject right in the middle. It just seemed really odd to me.

For the positive though, you do a very good job of hand held work because you get only a small amount of movement to give a "raw" and "intense" sort of feel...kindof like the camera jerk in the beginning of The Hunger Games. I really dig that style and may seek to try to emulate it with a few scenes of the next project I work on.

Summary: Great handheld work, good ideas. Bad exposure and strange choice of framing on occasion. Hope this helps and was not trying to be harsh. You put up you wanted feedback so I just believe in giving it to people straight.

Phil Rhodes · January 7, 2013

I think the hot skies work OK in the Africa stuff - it reminds me of Traffic, which I liked, although you wouldn't necessarily want to feature that sort of thing too heavily in a demo.

In general all I'd say is that I've always been told that people prefer to see scenes with several shots in continuity, ideally with dialogue, as opposed to montage against music. The basis for this, which makes sense to me at least, was that it's easy to cherry-pick good-looking stuff out of almost anything, but harder to make a reel look good if you include complete scenes, or at least parts of scenes.

I appreciate, from experience, that it can be very difficult to do this early in a career where one may have worked on material of, ahem, variable quality.

Pasi Rutanen · January 8, 2013

Thanks for taking time viewing and commenting on my reel, really appreciate it. I will take all this in consideration when i start editing my new reel shortly.