An Emmy-Nominated Editor Offers Nine Tips for a Dynamite Demo Reel

1. Start with the work. You can also start with your name, but launch into the work as soon as possible. Do not have anything fancy like a slide show or montage at the top. You can have a montage, but put it at the end.

2. Start with your best scene. The only guarantee you have is that they will look at the first scene for something like 30 seconds. After that, it's a complete unknown. Don't make them wait to see your best.

3. Your reel is not a short film. Context is unimportant. No one needs to know why you are laughing, crying, dancing, or fighting; they only need to believe it.

4. Scenes should focus on you, ideally starting and ending on you. Don't let other actors yammer on in your reel. Cut them down to the minimum. Maintain the structural integrity of the scene, but focus on you.

5. Don't overvalue celebrities. It's great if you are in a scene with some familiar faces, but that alone won't get you hired. Don't leave out a good scene and use a mediocre one instead only because the mediocre one has someone familiar in it. If two scenes are otherwise equal, let the celebrity be a tiebreaker.

6. Worry about the length of the scenes, not the total length of the reel. This is where I differ from many people, who feel that demo reels need to be short, short, short. But I have seen this in practice. I have produced movies and TV shows, and I have seen directors, producers, and casting directors look at reels. They look at the first scene and then scroll through the rest of the reel until they see something that catches their interest. Rarely can they tell you if a reel is two minutes long or 10. Don't worry about making the reel short; they won't finish watching it anyway.

7. The first thing we should see is a clear image of you. It can come before, after, or during your name, but it should be there. If your best scene doesn't allow for that, then use a nice moment from some other scene, where you are not talking and we get some kind of life in your eyes. Try to use moving video, not a still picture. Use a headshot only as a last resort, because that doesn't represent you in the medium in which the reel works. I almost never use headshots.

8. You owe nothing to the scene. If you can re-edit it so that you look like the star, do it.

9. Use the best-quality video you can find. If you have an old VHS tape of your scene from "CSI" but you know it's also available on DVD, rent or buy the DVD and use that. People mostly watch reels online now, and bad video looks even worse when compressed.

Joe Gressis is co-founder of Secret Handshake Entertainment, an editing house and production company, whose first movie, "A Little Help," with Jenna Fischer and Chris O'Donnell, is coming out this month. He's also a three-time Emmy-nominated editor, writer, and producer and a two-time winner of Back Stage's L.A. Readers' Choice Award for favorite demo reel producer.