The Mocks: Sizzle Reel Style

Part of our course involves something called a Sizzle Reel. The sizzle reel, as expalined to us is, a "fully edited 2-4 minute video demonstrating your design philosphy and approach to design. This is a personal visual essay- you are the screenwriter, the star, the producer and the director." It is quite important as it is 30% of our overall grade. So for this weeks Contemporary Design Culture class we had a mock making of a 30 second Sizzle reel but instead of it being about our design philosphy and our apporach to design it could have been about anything we wanted it to be. Jack Sutcliffe gave us a talk on storyboards and how they will help with the planning of our own 2-4 minute sizzle reels. One of the things he taught us to do was to map out our Shotlist, what the story contained, who it contained,where it happened and what else we needed which tied into the lecture we got from David O'Donoghue two weeks ago.

After the presentation, we all spilt off into teams. I was in a team with Aine Cronin, Noel Gleeson,Glen Mitchell, Ciáran Slattary and Sam O'Keefe. We spent the first hour trying to come up with what the video would be about. We had some dificaulty but eventually decieded to base our video on the life a Product Designer in U.L. At first it was difficult to navigate through all the different creative differences but once we did the results were extraordinary. Once we decided our shot list it was full steam ahead on filming which was where I was using my skill set. The video follows bright eyed and bushy tailed Noel Gleeson on his first day of his Product Design and Technology journey which we all know is a memorable one. The first scence shows young Noel meeting his fellow comrades for the first time before he sketches his first perspective cube. Emphasising how fast paced the learning process is here, the video goes on to show Noel progress through his learning of normal sketching, rendered sketching, model making and then his in inevitable decline into madness when he is litreally drowning in briefs. Our 'masterpiece' comes to an end as Noel finally has enough, finishes his catchphrase "Ah for F**k's Sake!!" he walks out of the studio.

I found this entire experiene very insightful and all in all, it was actually a really fun class. At the end of class we all came back into the crit room and watched everyones videos back to back, despite some technical difficulties, ours was well recieved with heavy laughter and a round of applause from the class. I really enjoyed the screening of everyones films and at the end of the day it was nice to see how all the teams different approach to the same activity.