About
The Demo Reel is its own genre of movie. It has rules and conventions that have developed over the last 20 years. When you combine business practicality with the art of editing, you will have a demo reel that casting directors will want to keep watching. Our skilled editing will retool a scene to be about your character and display your talents in the most compelling way.
Our Founder
Shaun Wood is a long time demo reel editor. Before earning his Bachelors Degree in Film and Electronic Arts, he took numerous classes in the fields of Theater Arts focusing on Acting, Speech Communication, Philosophy, and Sociology. While in film school, he was introduced to the world of casting during his internships under leading casting directors. After film school, he began working at a well known demo reel company in Hollywood. In less than a year's time, he moved from assistant editor to primary editor. Working as the primary reel editor, he improved the company's already savvy way of looking at demo reels into a more finely-tuned philosophy and process. With numerous satisfied clients over a three year period, Shaun decided to open a demo reel company for himself, and founded ContrarianMind.
House Calls
ContrarianMind is offering a different kind of editing service. While we have the equipment to edit a demo reel on a desktop computer in an office, laptop computers are now powerful enough to compete with their stationary counterparts. LA is a big place and we want to help cut out one more trip across the city by bringing our services to you. This means that agents and managers now have a convenient way to give feedback to a freshly cut reel. Let it be us who has to find parking!
An Improvement to Quality in the HD world
IMDb is allowing industy artists to upload their demo reels in HD. This has pushed demo reels beyond DVD quality. To facilitate the need for HD quality we do more than just cut all of our reels in HD. We have spent a considerable amount of time developing a workflow that preserves image quality for our client's work. Our mastering process will up-res standard definition material, from a DVD for example, into a seemingly HD look, all while keeping time and labor to a minimum so that high quality is affordable for our clients. All of our reels are promoted to HD.
Top of the Line!
ContrarianMind uses Avid Media Composer, the most advanced motion picture editing system. It is used by the majority of big-budget projects in the movie/television making industry world wide.