I am the happy recipient (and ongoing communication) of one of Grant’s visits to our University as well as one of his colleagues Stuy Holloway (who has since left Autodesk, sadly in a cull of creative finishing publicity and orientation staff) and they were great at communicating the advantages of Flame to the students who attended. Grant did a great demo of a twitchy nose wine advertisement on Smoke on Mac (pre connect-fx) and Stuy did a great demo of the Framestore Eastenders promo and students were blown away by the rain removal and time freeze through recursive ops trickery and DoF for the frozen droplets.
I teach sessions on Autodesk Flame at our place and I always find that students love what comes out of the lefthand viewport in a 2-up view but are intimidated by the left-hand schematics and are often a little resistant to the journey and revert to AfterEffects. I was speaking to a colleague in animation the other day who used to do sessions a few years ago on Fusion and was told by someone in the that students are used to the AfterEffects way and so we should, as it were, cave in.
This is a speedy diagnosis, and not a rigorous one, but the Microsoft-Adobe paradigm that has Word and Powerpoint, kind of looking like After Effects and Photoshop has students thinking that this is the only paradigm. They do loosen up to the nodes when you take them through it, but like someone with Stockholm syndrome the layers and menus become really baked-in.
Again, a speedy diagnosis, you can always de-program the Stockhold syndrome, but you have to invest time and invest various rhetorical strategies to try and budge and nudge the paradigm and this take marketing and it take persistence. This is my old drum, but from around 2010-2014 it looked like Autodesk was gathering a head of steam and building up a stock of clear demonstrations and drawing off a lot of voices in the biz, but this has obviously petered out whilst others are now building up their stock and image bank.
I thought that Autodesk were onto a really nice (beginnings) of a strategy with Smoke 2013 in terms of humanising the imagery in humanising the node (there is nothing naturally intimidating about the node, it is just paradigmatic muscle-memory, as it were, programming) but you have to have persistence of vision and not a miracle view of such deprogramming.
Strange thing is that in 3d the node is obviously pretty sovereign, but for some reason compositing and editorial aspects have a stronger resistance.
I would hate to see Flame humanised and dumbed down at all, but I thought the movements being made on the Manager were a really nice way of double-siding the software and I also kind of think that if something like Python could be used to generate internal software tutorials and could guide you through the software then it would be like having video tutorials and walkthroughs and cookalongs embedded into the software. Parts of the software could light-up, from import through to export, like a C21 version of the Gladiators tutorial, for example, or Fix-it-in-Post? This way of “lighting up” aspects might be like unlocking levels within a game, where you get to see some parts earlier in the “tutorial mode” (a tutorial-sided interface?) and others kind of hidden away during the tutorial sequencing? Whilst I hate the idea of having versions of Flame (like the later Smoke was a smaller version of Flame with some differences), maybe “versioning” Flame and finding a way to guide within the present “perspective” and hide the larger labyrinth might help to, not replace live education, but to help the bits in-between a little more?
What I do love about Flame actually “is” that you are not faced with a splurge of menus but you move through it and it only presents itself to you when you need that given aspect (you could easily not bump into Action, if you want) but, as with a labyrinth, you can easily start to get lost, and so a helping-hand, baked into the software, can give you a quick escape route?
Grant is doing a great job, btw, on those current introductory tutorials and using some footage from one of our student projects!
Just a few speedy-messy thoughts.
Cheers
Tony