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I've just released a small side project website that came from an idea I had with a buddy during our plan ride to SXSW Interactive.

It's supposed to be a gimmicky and easy way to find motion designers. Basically, you can upload "reels" and people can view random ones and vote on ones they like. It's kind of like Chat Roulette, except with no penises (so far).

You can read more about the making of the site here:

http://almosteffortless.com/2010/03/26/reel-roulette/

The thing that makes me happy about this site is that it was built in about 30 hours of work between 3 people. I know it's nothing too special and has plenty of room for improvement, but people seem to be enjoying it so far.

I'd love to hear any ideas you may have about improving the site, and I'm pondering potential ways to make money from the thing without spoiling it. It's been fun as-is, but it would be nice if we could justify spending more time on it than we already have by way of making some cash.

Any feedback is more than welcome. Thanks!

Reelroulette is attractive and usable and makes sense for the motion design niche. Good work for a limited time investment. Though, I can think of some useful features (more voting features, view all submissions, commenting, etc)

PS: If I owned this URL, I might use it to do something chatroulette related while there's still a thousand and one opportunities. But good on getting involved in what you enjoy doing. Good luck trevorturk.

I love the website. The design looks great (don't change it!) and I like the simple, intuitive interface.

I spent about 10 minutes flipping through reels, and linked a friend. Now he's going through reels. We probably won't get much work done for the rest of the afternoon :D

same here watched 3 or 4 and had to close it or nothing will get done. Some very talented people on there.

If I press Like this Reel, will it actually like the vimeo video? I ask this, because then it would be syndicated on my action stream both at vimeo and elsewhere (fb, friendfeed etc)

If that's not currently possible, I suggest looking into it. As user, I would like the action of Liking this reel be reflected on the source file.

If you do that, it's easy to see vimeo being interested in your product/feature/mashup or at least you can attract active vimeo users, whom discovering and liking is a large part of their activity.

They're separate for now. That's an idea I've thought about, though, but I'm not sure if it's better to keep Vimeo's "like" and this "like" as separate things or not...

For the time being, I think our plan is to make a "top 20" page or something like that which would feature the reels with the most votes.

You could always make a "like in vimeo" link appear after you like it in your app.

Sweet app. Great portfolios.

You should track at what times the people click next.

Your like button is too far away from the next button, and neither has keyboard shortcuts.

Keyboard shortcuts is an awesome idea. I'll add that to the backlog.

Why not the frontlog?

Site looks great, by the way. One thing I'll say is that I ran into the same reel after just two clicks -- this should be pretty easy to avoid, either by shuffling an array of reels (rather than pulling one out at random), or by tracking which reels I've seen in a session variable.

Good luck!

it seems the new tagline dejour for side projects is: chat roulette for "x" with no pensises.

This is a really good idea. It just so happens that I'm in the market for a motion designer or animator for a TV commercial I want to run.

I didn't know exactly where to search for any talented designers, and eLance, along with some of the job boards, really don't give you much material to review. But I like this setup at first glance, and the quality so far seems to be pretty good.

I might actually find who I'm looking for through this service.

That's great to hear! Please let me know if you find someone through the site - that would be awesome.

Sorry for being disconnected, but is there a 2 line explanation of what I'm watching? They're visually entertaining, but I don't get much beyond that.

These are personal animation showreels from animators and designers in the motion graphics and animation industry. Reel Roulette appears to arrange many of them in an easily viewable format all in one place, so people/peers/employers can check them out.

So they are showpieces? My other googling indicates they may contain or be comprised of their other (paid) work?

The site itself is very cool, was mostly wondering at the underlying item and why it exists (beyond the fact they look cool).

Artists in our industry (I'm an animator) create reels of their past work - paid or unpaid - to act as a collection of their best stuff in order to get jobs, bookings, etc. We have a lot of freelancers in our industry, and so most people have a reel that they can send to companies and say "Look at how great my stuff is, let's work together!"

Yeah - I'm not big into this industry either (one of the guys I built the site with is) but I basically think of it as a resume.

Think of it as an artist's code sample :)

I noticed you're asking your users to enter a vimeo URL by hand. I know that during signup it's impractical to bounce the user over to vimeo to authenticate, but once the user is signed up do you give them the option of picking the video from their albums instead of entering a URL?

I've definitely thought about that, but decided that it was too much work relative to the gain it would bring. Maybe I'm wrong, though...

These were a lot of fun to watch. I have no stake in this scene but enjoyed clicking through and seeing what folks came up with. I get a similar feeling watching http://www.demoscene.tv/

Suggestion: temporarily disable the "next reel" button for a duration of time proportional to the frequency of my clicks thereupon. Make me watch the reels instead of trying to satisfy my urge to see "what's next?"

I don't know about the whole "Roulette" theme to it, but the content is gold, that's what makes this site... Good stuff!

Wow, how did you get those designers on board? There's some real good stuff on there. I hope this takes off. Good luck.

Nick, one of the other guys that worked on the site, is into this industry. He does tutorials and stuff, so a lot of people follow his website and twitter account.

Pretty good idea. Do you offer stats for people with reels coming through your app?

No, but Vimeo tracks plays, and I've seen people on Twitter saying that they're getting more traffic because of the site, so I think it's working... I think having some kind of stats tracking would be nice, but that'd be more work ;)

i love the colors and clean minimalism. are you planning on feeding the likes to something like directededge to make it smarter?

along that vein, why are you using likes instead of ratings?

Ask HN: Review my side project - Reel Roulette