Hey there guys so I'm back after a LONG while in case anybody was wondering where I was or what I was doing I have been at college for 3D Animation and Game Design I actually am getting ready to graduate hooray!! Anyway If anybody else wants to know more about my year at school I'll gladly comment on that later but back to the topic. So you have a skill or a talent that is marketable and you want to make a little bit of $$ or you want to find a career in your skill so you take courses and learn a bunch of stuff and you finish your instructor tells you to take your best work of the year and put it in a Demo Reel and Portfolio {At least mine did} So you sift through the not so good stuff and you find your hidden treasures you make a website to have your videos and images up and you realize that your "best" work still sucks so your instructor tells you to take it down and start completely from scratch you take 2 months to make the best things you can make at your knowledge and skill level and you finally have some great stuff you go look for a job and you send the people to your site and they still aren't impressed what do you do then?

In case you haven't figured it out yet this is what happened to me So what did I do I talked with a man named Mark Simon and another man named Bill Lia they both gave me some great advice in case you don't know these two geniuses little back story for ya Mark Simon works or still did at the time at Nickelodeon and Bill Lia does commercials for Disney. They told me that my stuff was good for my skill level but to make it even better I would have to use a lot of what they called "magic" basically movie magic different rendering settings lighting camera angles there was a lot to go through trust me it made me so mad when i had to rerender it all total I think I racked up over maybe a month in render time alone for all of these separate still images and videos

Anyway so I did that and went back to the job they looked at my stuff again and I got the job { Was working on a project base system} basically they have work for me I get to do it they don't tough nuts not a lot of $$

But I learned a lot about basically changing a few things can change how well something very simple or crappy into looking like it's a picasso {note I have never had my work called that by myself or by anybody else haha}

My Point is to all you artists and filmmakers if something doesn't work change the direction the lighting the textures doesn't matter because it'll look 100% better then before and may land you a better job then I had

My closing statement is to have everybody look at my site and just keep in mind I have only been doing this since June 2011 yet it looks like it's on par with some really good stuff thanks for reading and have a great weekend.

http://michaelbeechamsportfolio.blogspot.com/

After reading all this all I can say is I hope you got a free ride to that collage...
If you worked really hard and your professors and potential bosses dont like you work so you have to use/learn new skills to get a job then Id say it just wasnt worth the big bill, especially when you can learn EVERYTHING on the internet nowadays and get work without collage degrees.
A portfolio can always use improvement, thats the real lesson here.

There's definitely some good advice there, FierceDeity. (It's great to see you around.) ^^

I really like the 3D examples on your site (the pokéball image is crisp), and you're definitely correct about adding a little pizazz to make a real difference in getting hired. =]

Nice to see you as well XMO. and well Lao I'm still in High school {homeschooled} so i dual enrolled at Orlando Tech a vocational college so didn't pay a dime but yeah you are right and trust me wasn't a very big paycheck either i got maybe if I was lucky $45 per project. How's the site look to you guys?

Game creators arent rich, thats not why we do this, if your getting $45 a project id say cool! Getting some exp and money thats great! Your doing better then me and I been doing this for years and your younger so be VERY happy at your good fortune:)

Trust me I am i'm creating a kickstarter project that hopefully will get funded 100% just got back from my competition in Pensacola got 3rd place lol got inducted into the national technical honors socieity still got alot more stuff to do full plate >.<

As long as you dont try to start one with all default RTP, they already got a guy on there doing that and I just want to kick him in the balls. Remember ppl like seeing abit of work first before they thrown donw to support you.

My project is an animated Movie so no worries lol

I'd say diversity is a principal aim for any type of portfolio. Its all well and good to contain your very best work, but that is your best work because its a style you frequently use, and so you can come across as a person with only one style. Showing you can do a similar thing a thousand different ways is a lot more impressive than doing a thousand things one way, regardless of the quality.
Now to paraphrase Wilde 'a well-rounded person is the one thing we all fear to become'; this is because jack-of-all-trades are usually masters of none, however you're putting this portfolio together for others, and others appreciate different things to you and in consequence look for different things. Therefore if your portfolio contains one style and its just not what their looking for, well usually its going to be tough luck no matter how good it is.
I guess the best rl example I could give is I dont particularly like playing slide guitar (well I just dislike all the retuning) and rarely do it, but I'm still a better guitarist for it because, when push comes to shove, if someone wants to hear some slide I can provide it.

Oh wow! then I cant wait to see it, I look over that site alot so I hope to see it.

Here's hoping we just got to get the preproduction finalized and the KS video made rewards for pledging will include signed copies of the movie T-shirts able to choose from three designs your name somewhere in the movie somebody paid me in advance to have his name on a gravestone I'm like wow really haha soundtrack to the movie etc some really good stuff so hopefully people buy into it once we finalize it all. My goal is to make it on par with some of the animated films out already from Disney and Pixar but perhaps that's too much to wish for >.<

Dont get me wrong Disney does some great movies, but id much rather see one that someone actually put some love and creativity into, and im sure it would be a very impressive add to your Portfolio. I wouldnt worry to much about being on par with there movie quality.

Well thanks alot Lato funny thing is this project was born 3 weeks ago there's still a lot to do