The Problem with Multi-Lingual Showreels

You should always try to keep each showreel in one language only. If you have a single showreel with clips in 2 different languages, it can cause problems.

As you might know already, casting directors (CDs) will often only watch the first 10 seconds of a showreel to see if the actor looks appropriate (see here for more on this).

This can cause problems if your showreel has the first 2 or 3 clips in one language and then goes into a couple of clips in another language.

Suppose you submit for a job in German and your showreel starts in English but then goes into German. The CD will open up your showreel and see you speaking English and then close your showreel after a few seconds because you’re speaking the wrong language and they’ll assume you’ve either sent the wrong showreel or you can’t speak German. In other words, they won’t even wait for your German clips or they might skip through the showreel and miss them completely.

So it is much better to have short showreels in separate languages than 1 showreel with more than one language.

The same applies. It pays dividends to have separate showreels for American and British English, for example, or Standard Italian and Neapolitan, or Standard Arabic and Syrian Arabic, etc.