There are two types of “storytellers” in advertising:
Story-doers are definitely the latter. They also no doubt describe contract work as “collaboration”.
But as with Flamist, I can’t hate the term simply because it’s so bad. You’ve got to respect that.
While browsing the topic list, for a second I read this topic as “Aliens vs Predators”…
Rereading the entire thread with “Aliens vs. Predators” works shockingly well.
Victor in Nikita? Oh man. I have thought about this so many times.
An interesting accelerant to this fiery conversation of artist versus operator is the fact that when searching Flame Operator results on LinkedIn, you get millions of responses. If you search for Flame Artist, you get 3,900 results, which, is a reasonable estimate of how many Flame Artists I mean Operators there are in the world.
Reminds me of the days I used to see ads for “Mac Operators” with design experience.
A scam to keep the salary down.
If you’re using a machine or software tool to develop something that is visually unique or have solved a difficult imaging storage problem in your kitchen then you’re a Flame Artist cabinet installer.
I dont see a real difference between a flame operator and a cabinet installer.
Oh come on, a cabinet installer?
If it’s “visually unique” you might as well be called a furniture artist. Or are we Flame Artisans?
Yeah, cabinet installers. Most of the time we aren’t in charge of determining the canvas or medium…nor the paints themselves for that matter. We are executing someone else’s creative vision. We are cooking food that someone else grew and presenting a dish that someone else promised to a customer. And thats not art.
Well, at least the cabinet installers don’t need to stream over NDI while installing cabinets. Or have long zoom sessions.
This is from a Phil Tippett, of ILM fame, Reddit Ask Me Anything and I think about it sometimes and I think it’s kind of applicable here?
“In the olden days, producers knew what visual effects were. Now they’ve gotten into this methodology where they’ll hire a middleman – a visual effects supervisor, and this person works for the producing studio. They’re middle managers. And when you go into a review with one of them, there’s this weird sort of competition that happens. It’s a game called ‘Find What’s Wrong With This Shot’. And there’s always going to be something wrong, because everything’s subjective. And you can micromanage it down to a pixel, and that happens all the time. We’re doing it digitally, so there’s no pressure to save on film costs or whatever, so it’s not unusual to go through 500 revisions of the same shot, moving pixels around and scrutinizing this or that. That’s not how you manage artists. You encourage artists, and then you’ll get – you know – art. If your idea of managing artists is just pointing out what’s wrong and making them fix it over and over again, you end up with artists who just stand around asking “OK lady, where do you want this sofa? You want it over there? No? Fine. You want it over there? I don’t give a fuck. I’ll put it wherever you want it.” It’s creative mismanagement, it’s part of the whole corporate modality. The fish stinks from the head on down. Back on Star Wars, Robocop, we never thought about what was wrong with a shot. We just thought about how to make it better.” Phil Tippett
it’s tricky to answer sometimes. Are Damien Hirst’s staff of butterfly catchers and shark embalmers artists?
Is everyone who worked on a movie an artist? If not where is the line drawn? Is the costume designer but not the wardrobe department? The cinematographer but not the gaffer?
We are craftspersons. Not artists.
Depends on the job every time. Sometimes it’s installing cabinets. Sometimes we do really creative work that people come to us for specifically. Plenty of jobs that are definitely not just carpentry installs.
I do refer to myself as a flame artist on the socials for visibility. There ain’t no art in what I do!
It reminds me of a place I worked where one “flame artist” liked to frequently say “we just make license plates here.” What occurred to me in that moment in my inner monolog was “ah, that is why her work looks so bland. She sees her work as making license plates, and it shows.”
Sure, plenty of stuff we do is kind of more or less just executing. But that is not what people come for when they’re looking for a top Flame artist.
For example I’m doing a shot now, flat bid, that I could have turned in hours ago and the client would have approved and it was completely passable work. But on my own I’m going in and adding 1,000 tiny flourishes that make it 1000% better. Higher end creative stuff that comes only from the person holding the pen, whatever name you want to refer to them as.
Client isn’t sophisticated enough to ask for these things or to know why exactly it looks so good. They just know it looks really, really good. And that’s why they’ll come back to me and folks like me, rather than plenty of people who are cheaper, who just execute and install cabinets.
Just my $0.00002.
As a post-script, the said artist was eventually let go. Bummed me to see a nice person I really liked axed, but, she earned it…
I guess my bottom line here is, words matter. If you tell yourself you’re just an operator or a tradesman, then you will just operate and ply a trade.
If you think of your work as a creative expression, then you’ll create and innovate — and your clients will know the difference between you and an operator. They do get these things.
In this context, it doesn’t matter if you’re called an “operator” or an “artist”. It’s about obsessive care about images.
Who cares about those semantics of artist vs. op?
