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Honestly- skip the gatekeepers. Send your portfolio to your contacts. I hire based on referral- it’s smarter, easier, and better. Stop sending your book blindly to agency recruiters.
Also- I don’t care if the video is SD for old work. But - 1) that old work better be great and worthy of being in your portfolio. 2) you need current work that’s great- spec or real doesn’t matter. I want to see new thinking for problems in 2020.
Well said @ECD1. I never reach out to recruiters directly. I always find someone I know at the agency and get my resume to them. And I know someone at pretty much every agency in my market since I’ve been around a bit now. They are motivated, too, because we’re friends and there’s a referral fee.
There goes my print using letterpress
A good idea is timeless. We still deliver a 4:3 for social (looking at you Hulu). And now we also deliver 4:5, 9:16, 1:1.
Lost me at Millennial gatekeepers...if that SD work is Outpost.com Wolves or Milk Aaron Burr or Little Caesar’s or Monster When I Grow Up, I’ll gladly look at your book!
You haven’t produced anything in the past 8 years? Why is your portfolio so out of date? You should be replacing old work with newer work as you sell it.
I have produced work in the past 8 years, AND I've produced great work prior to the last 8 years. Some of the older work is better than some of the modern work. If the perception of that work as "out-of-date" rests merely on its resolution, then it's not out of date at all, but rather, your idea of what good work is has been improperly conflated with the trappings of modernity.
Do you have Adobe Premier? You can crop and sharpen and recolor your spots and it’s not that difficult. Sure, there a little learning curve but worth it. There’s plenty of “how-to” vids out there to guide you. Good luck.
Crop it 9:16 vertical, drop it in an iPhone display and call it social content to fool gatekeepers.
Film gatekeeper reactions and make a promotional industry case study on the merit of good ideas to get into award shows.
Some good advice here thanks, and in case anyone else reading this wants to make their work look less ancient, I found a guy who wrote custom software to upscale SD to 4K. It took 72 hours to render 8 spots, and my old work look pretty freaking sweet now.
I just realized the files I sent him were actually 480p (720 x 480), and not 720p as I originally thought. Turns out the resolution is the vertical line count, so I'm even more impressed with the result. I'm trying to convince him to create an App or site as a front end for his server farm so people could upload their home movies and us old ad folks could upscale our spots. He seems to view it as an artistic undertaking requiring hands-on manipulation, not something to be automated. Which is too bad as I have another two dozen spots I'd like to upscale, but can't afford to do all of them. Maybe it's a good thing to force myself to upscale only those worthy of it.
The work should be assessed based on the strength of the big idea and how it was brought to life across channels. I would venture to say that millennial gatekeepers may not appreciate the notion of big ideas, versus execution.
Pro
Yes, and when you pull out that old reel to inspire, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to apologize for the blurry, old look of the footage, because you know whoever needs to see it will subconsciously discount the reel (and you, by extension) if the low resolution makes it feel “old”?
You are a Creative Director. The fidelity of your work should not be a point of contention. You should be selling through ideas, concepts, strategy, client interaction, team building, and leadership. Don’t hang on a single item but show how all the pieces ladder up to the bigger picture.
Your ability to align past work to modern day executions is a testament to your value as a Creative Director. Your book should reflect this.
A couple people have mentioned it, but you can absolutely recrop 4x3 SD work to 16x9 and it automatically looks newer. I asked an editor to recrop some old spots and have them on my reel and have gotten plenty of work. I highly recommend it.
Time to convert my face and voice to HD
I started to trim my resume of when I began my ad career. And try not to have stuff in my portfolio that is obviously too ancient.
A lot of talk about the content not looking it’s best scaled up, and a lot of talk about how to scale it up but is that really the problem?
Have you tried looking for work recently WITHOUT using work that was mostly made by creative teams you supervise? Give it a try.
Just run it though handbrake and upscale it to 4K. They won’t know any difference, they are used to the crappy 4K low bitrate that Netflix streams.
It was a joke against how millennials just know streaming. Most probably don’t even know what Blu-ray is.