6 Tips for Animation Demo Reels

This article is about things that an animator should and shouldn't do when creating a demo reel to show possible clients or recruiters. (This part is gonna be like me reciting the article)...
The first tip that they tell you is to keep the demo reel short (around 30 seconds), mostly because recruiters don't have long attention spans and they'll be able to tell if they like or hate your work very quickly... Just kidding, the real reason why they say you should keep it short is because recruiters don't have much spare time to watch everything you've put together, they have many more reels to look at as well. This actually leads to the articles second tip, don't include all of your animation work that you've ever done. Only put your very best work on the demo. The article author says this because recruiters won't want to see all of your basic or bad work. This can sometimes go against you, as you could start your reel with your awesome animation, then slowly get worse as it gets to your physics training ball squishing or your really terrible animations (which most likely every animator has made at one point).
The articles third tip is to avoid cliche characters. Your awesome amazing-looking character isn't going to be all that unique if he goes to rescue a damsel in distress or get revenge on a bad guy. The actual advice the article gives is for you, as an actual real-life person to take acting classes (BOOM! I'm already done with that). The classes should help you create a more unique sense for your character so it can develop.
The article's fourth tip is to know your audience. This one isn't that tough, you're not going to want to show Pixar or Dreamworks your Serial killer demo reel (save that for your own animation company).
The fifth tip in the article is to make sure that the recruiters will be able to get to your demo reel. You don't want them to have to jump hurdles to see it, just provide a nice, clean link.
The final tip is to pretty much become a hipster. It says to stay away from popular trends, as they will make you look like a normal part of the herd average Joe. (Shout-out to our class's Joes [I looked it up, that's grammatically correct])

Anyway, that was the factual summary part.
Here's the thoughts and opinions part.

I thought this article was very informative and helpful to anyone who might be putting together an animation demo reel. Mostly I could have guessed most of this stuff myself, but the one thing that it did teach me is that recruiters would care about the character of the character(s) in the animation.
I would have just thought they care about the look and quality of the animation. This is very relevant to the field of digital media because I feel like we are going create our own animation demo reel in class this year, but probably not for a while. Also it is relevant because animation demo reels contain animation, which is the sub-class of digital media that we are in...

Animation!