Showreel to Showreel Cacophony

Watching showreels on Youtube has recently become one of my new, pathetic obsessions.
What was once a fairly private affair between the designer and the possible customer has now become open and public for everyone who does and most likely doesn´t care.

These self-promoting clips tend to reveal the real connections of our visual world. News-trailers, music-clips, commercials for ice-cream and phone-sex, insurance- and car-companies, governments and the pharma-industry are the art-magnates behind this ultra-ballardian showreel by british designer Gavin Aslett.

Set to the sleek, metronomic new-wave of Ultravox´ "Mr. X" we see an endless parade of blurred graphics, logos, and alienated images. The whole presentation follows this distorted sci-fi imagery, but I keep asking myself if the creator is really happy with his customers.
Can he emotionally distance himself in any way from the demands of the corporations in a way that his visual style suggests?


Some reels have the goodies hidden and sandwiched between cute cartoons and yoghurt-ads. Watch for the x-ray skeletons in a car crash in this work-sample of Antonio Frias

Another interesting reel comes from Plan A Productions. A four minutes bombardment of gloomy, superstitious and horrifying images that depict situations you wouldn´t like to find yourself in. Yet, all these images, echoing bad drug trips, dystopian nightmares of a world reigned by malevolent machines and translucent identities promote lifestyle products.

The random succession of unrelated product imagery reveals the void and the cynicism that lurks behind this corporate conglomerate but taken at face value the images might transcend a detached and cool, desirable aura.

This speed-reel ends with a car commercial that shows the product accelerating towards a sun that resembles an atomic bomb explosion.