Plan Your Content's Sequence and Timing.

There's a lot to arranging your demo reel; it’s a matter of varying content between types (for example: 2D interspersed with 3D), of building up to a finale, of sequencing to your music. You want to arrange your clips so that your stronger samples support your weaker samples, but you also want to try to tell a story, and can at times cleverly arrange unrelated clips so that they seem to connect.

The best method is to get all of your clips together, and then arrange them in a program like Adobe Premiere. Play with them a bit; shift them around like puzzle pieces with your edited music track attached, until you're sure that you're happy with the arrangement and it has the impact and tells the story that you want. You should start off with something good to hook the audience, but not your best; blend back and forth between your better pieces, and the good-but-not-stunning pieces, so that you're displaying all of your work without losing them in long stretches of mediocrity with the best pieces only at the beginning and the end. Arrange your clips to build up to your finale, which should be your best piece; the last clip will be the final image that stays in the viewers' minds, and a large part of forming their final impression. You want to go out with a "bang", and leave them amazed

This is where your music will really help you. Once you've got your clips basically arranged, it really helps if you can start tweaking that arrangement, adding or removing frames here and there to shift things just enough so that key moments in the animation combine with key moments in the music track. It's a lot like orchestrating a cinematic soundtrack; if you're using a music track that has a long, thrumming crescendo leading up to a loud cymbal crash, you could time it with something a simple as a character jumping off of a building; the crescendo builds up the fall, and the impact of landing hits with the cymbal crash. Using your soundtrack in that fashion can really make your demo reel "snap", and turn it from a simple arrangement of clips into a dynamic, powerful music video.