Goodness, sorry for the late reply (not sure if it’s still relevant now OTL) This is also a little long…

It depends on the school, what they consider important and what you consider important. If they already expect you to know some animation then work on that I suppose, if it’s open skill level then show what you can do and what you love.

Some schools will have differing views on content which can be hard to predict, some might not like certain styles or including fan work. One lecturer might have strong opinions on one thing that differ from another. Here’s some of what I included in my folio for RMIT:

While mainly original, it included some art for friends and fanart. Something to note, I did 2 art subjects in my last years of high school and didn’t include any of it in my folio. My work from those subjects was heavily influenced by my teachers, and I felt did not reflect me or were irrelevant. In my case as well, I frequently drew in class and at home which isn’t good practice during the final years of school, but meant I had a large folio of things I really liked.

For my interview I brought in this:

A bag of 15 sketch books from the previous 2 or so years. I’m not sure whether this worked in my favour, but again, it was a reflection of my work. They asked me about long term goals and what I’d produce if I could make a game or cartoon, and I talked about my OCs, the stories I was working on, and the things I’d make. If there is an interview portion, include things you can talk about.

Maybe try and find people who have recently done the program you’re looking to apply to and see what they did. It really can vary a lot, I can only tell you how I went about applying, and then make an arbitrary guess at what they liked. Everyone’s situation is different.

Look at the details of the classes in the course as well, if it has a wide variety of classes it’s probably okay to just show them the best of what you can do! If it’s more specialised or has specific requirements maybe show them that you have skills in that area or are learning them.

What I followed with my folio (and my current work folio) is to show things relevant to the goal, things I care about, and things that reflect me. When you get to industry reels every second counts, you have to keep it short and sharp, your best work while still being relevant. Sorry I can’t be more helpful than that :\ there’s so much variety to schools and individual folios that it’s a bit hard to vaguely advise.

[NOTE] the art classes I did in highschool focused on graphic design and digital art. While I kind of liked some of my design work, it was irrelevant to the course and I had better character designs I could include. And for digital art I got the teacher who didn’t like cartoons (didn’t seem to like traditional art either), so my final works had very little of anything I liked and were quite bland.

SAI for most stuff, and Photoshop for exporting, adding textures and other bits! Usually sketch everything on paper though and scan it in :O

I’d like to be more active! I often forget to start recording when I’m drawing stuff, only really go to record if it’s a larger picture that I’ve planned out. If people are interested in seeing recordings of my usual stuff though and not just the painty stuff, I’ll try to remember for next time :D

…might see if I can set up a camera to try recording traditional stuff too.