Lately, a group of us at work have been looking through submitted portfolios. The major industry shows are done, and HR has a few boxes of DVDs and CDs for us to go through. And we go through them all. Having gone through a lot lately, I have some advice for would-be game artists, and this is as good a place as any to impart it. It's fresh in my mind, and since I've been away from technology lately, fly fishing for salmon in the middle of nowhere, I'm not good for au courant industry news.

By "a few boxes of DVDs and CDs", I mean a few largish file boxes. Hundreds of submissions. Since schools tend to teach everything, there are a lot of reels where the candidate is selling themselves as the Compleat Artist: model, texture, rig, animate, they do it all.

To prevent the inevitable, "I left the CD on your desk, didn't you see it?" issue of passing portfolios around, we schedule meetings, with various team leads in attendance, to run through the reels. They're expensive meetings, but when you have the Compleat Artist to look at, you need a representative of all art disciplines to see if a candidate is strong in one area, even if weak in another.

All of this is by way of saying that several senior people give up a chunk of time to look at your reel. So make it count. Put your best stuff at the beginning of the reel, don't choose crazy music to accompany it, and don't pad your reel with weak work if you feel it is too short. It's not too short: when it's long and filled with weak work interspersed with good work, I'll wonder about your judgment. Don't also be tempted to lengthen it with several different lingering pan shots over the same model: it can look like you've only ever done one model, and are excessively proud of it.

Reels that spend too much time setting things up â'' talky intros, telling a story of drama and moment, whatever â'' more often than not make folks impatient with getting to see what we're there to see. Unless you're also a brilliant writer as well as a magnificent artist, odds are the story isn't helping sell your art.

Show what you're good at, and don't show what you're not good at. If you don't know particle systems very well, don't put a bad particle explosion in your animation. If you can't paint textures, show flat-shaded models. Anything that's weak can detract from what is strong. Play to your strengths, and make folks look at what you want them to look at.

When there are dozens of submissions to go through, don't give anyone a reason to say, "I've seen enough," after the first few seconds. Any delay to getting to your strongest work is a possible reason that your strongest work might never be looked at. Again, when you have a lot of portfolios to go through, you try to be efficient. Make your first impression count.