Did you go to college @GPM ?
I remember Saturday afternoons teaching up at NYU Cada center. I think i still have my syllabus
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Did you??
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By the time I entered college years I had already been working in the industry for 5 years. I gave university a try for half a semester then bailed. Boring. Slow pace. Expensive. So I just bailed and did my own thing.
Okay let me ask a different question. Do you do your own taxes?
I think my CPA does that?
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Why do you pay a cpa to do your taxes?
Running a business is more complicated than individual taxes. I have to have help.
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Exactly. I do the same. I could do my own taxes. But it’s complicated and a dedicated professional is worth it to us.
Learning Flame is the same.
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My life changed in a very positive way when I decided to stop doing my own books. Culley passed me his bookkeeper and for $100- month, my life is so much more serene.
Thanks for running through that little thought experiment with me. Our community is strong but will likely only evolve with people dedicated and compensated to do so. Same as a education. Sure. You can skip formal education. I haven’t had schooling in any of my several careers. But it would have been nice to have a low cost, approachable education that didn’t cost 6 figures. My kids are 12, 12 and 9. With in state tuition rates rising as fast as the stock market, I need to save 250k PER KID to pay for their colllege. That’s $750,000.
There has to be a better way.
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Yikes! Formal education at this time does not reap benefits over the costs. I wouldn’t do it, personally. Hey, let’s have a lifetime of debt, for something that doesn’t actually advance your goals. In my 25+ years working in the industry, no one has ever asked which college I went to. Just show me a reel.
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I’m glad that there are more opportunities to learn VFX now - we had to just white knuckle it back in the day. But formal education in this field is a waste of time and money.
I don’t disagree Randy. I also hear where you’re coming from @GPM. I think it’s important to avoid adding barriers to entry for people wanting to learn Flame, being as it’s not the only kid running for class president and it doesn’t necessarily eat lunch at the popular kids table. It just doesn’t make sense to monetize every bit of information about a software that isn’t on the radar of most young/ aspiring artists. But I think the community does a good job overall of balancing that, there’s a nice mix of free and paid learning resources, and hopefully that stays on course to continue. Just my 2 cents.
In our specific neck of the woods, formal education doesn’t do a ton, but across the board having an undergrad degree is something like a $2MM difference in lifetime earnings vs just graduating hs. Without my modestly priced state U education, I would not have found post production. Just don’t take out loans to major in lithography at SAIC.
I really miss the user groups too. Thank you for your thoughts.
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I agree, and also not. Sometimes "white knuckle"ing doesn’t work for everyone. Everyone figures out stuff differently and also learns differently. While one person “White knuckles” the other has a hard time but does excel at someone showing them as they can also ask questions at the same time. So therefore not a waste of time in the long run.
But also peoples time IS money, so therefore why do teachers get paid or even consultants? Especially when its time teaching someone else. Still very valuable and carries a lot weight in this industry. I believe its ok to charge for knowledge you are teaching someone else.
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I believe the 80’s said it best. Diffrnt strokes for diffrnt folks.
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@ace_elliott I used to assist both @andymilkis and @chq at NYU’s CADA in the early aughts (when we were children) and also ended up teaching Digital Post-Production there as well. Happy to chat about it.
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Without getting to much into the weeds on this one, this is more a discussion of information versus communication.
There’s a huge amount of information available on flame. The thing about information is that just having a lot of it doesn’t mean it’s useful. A frame of colored noise has an insane amount of information—uncompressed it will be the largest file size every time because of that amount of information but it tells you little. It’s entropy is high.
The human act of compression—of distilling a huge amount of information, culling away 99% of it so that it fits into the small data pipes of our human modes of communication and ordering it such that the receiving party can uncompress that transmission into a semblance of it’s intended meaning is both an artform that requires a large degree of intuition and skill and patience as well as being the miracle of humanity.
Short version: Teachers everywhere are underpaid and under-valued.
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