How can you pick just one memory?! My life is littered with ashes of experience in flame sessions:
• Start out serving coffees on the night shift at a big post-house and walking into Flame suites at 3am to the artist and client going at it over the enormous Wacom. Pun intended. Names shall remain nameless. And yes this happened more than once.
• Spending a year teaching myself Flame on the nights shifts at MPC by reading those 3 massive manuals (remember those) and realizing it would be years before I would get a job in suite I may have lied just a little bit to get my first position as a Sr. flame artist on one of the Harry Potter movies. Talk about sink your swim. Probably my favourite year ever.
• Arrive in NYC. Sit in a room for a day working on a music video with a cool young kid whose name I couldn’t pronounce so we both decided it was just easier if I called him Mr West.
• Filling entire fridges full of coke and then watching them being empties and filled with Pepsi for tomorrow’s client.
• Spend years working on spots and watching credits being given to other people.
• Learning not to ever care about credits.
• Being let go in the middle of the 2008 recession and therefore having to leave NYC for Montreal and turning tragedy into opportunity and opening my own studio. Biggest and most humbling learning curve ever.
• Investing in my 5th Flame system back when they were truly expensive one month before Autodesk announced Flame-On-Mac and subscription based licensing and realizing that Autodesk had changed our wonderful community forever.
• Building and using what I believe was the first Flame-On-Linux laptop on set for a fun commercial that involved deflating actors using nothing but a sex doll, a car pump and a green cloth held up by a teenage PA.
• Being asked by Autodesk to present our use of Flame on set with a sex doll at NAB but not being told that we, me and my sex doll, would be going on immediately after the absolutely incredible presentation by the Avatar team. Thanks Autodesk! Lol
• Months of learning other software only to become more frustrated and always returning to Flame.
• Various incredible, wonderful and equally obnoxious clients.
• Opened doors to untold incredible opportunity.
• Lifelong inspiring friends, infinitely more talented and successful than I could dream of being, who fill me with pride and awe every single day. Most of you are here.
• Marta, an angel of a human being at Autodesk support who has saved my skin more times than I could possibly remember.
The memories I have had to leave out for fear of being sued, again, bring me to tears. There is a book in all of us I am sure!!
The bundle includes an Autodesk t-shirt, tumbler/bottle, stickers, and some other goodies.
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