Greetings everyone,
With the recent announcement to transition off of Facebook, it’s a good opportunity to report on the current state of Logik and to announce our intentions as stewards and supporters of Flame artists across the globe.
Who owns and operates Logik?
Logik.tv and the resulting collective offering of One Frame of White, Logik Live, Logik Forums, Logik Academy, Logik Discord, Logik Podcast, the Ask a Flame Artist Podcast, and Logik Hivemind are fully owned and operated by Flame Logik, LLC, a multi-member LLC based in the State of Illinois. The members of Flame Logik LLC are Andy Milkis (@andymilkis) and Randy McEntee (@randy).
A few highlights…
In Andy’s 8th year as custodian of One Frame of White, he has managed to wrangle over $250,000 worth of prize money from the companies that support Flame artists. This year’s 1st Prize is a state of the art laptop worth over $12,000. That’s amazing!
For Logik Live, Andy has completed 67 episodes, totalling over 5,000 hours of watch time. Andy’s weekly show highlights the very best of our artists, technologies, and community. To put 67 episodes in perspective, Game of Thrones has just 73 episodes. Just sayin.
The Logik Forums has amassed close to 1,000 users from across the world in its first 15 months and thanks to you is the best place on the interwebs to receive and give Flame knowledge. Additionally, hiring authorities have noticed and freelancers and staff artists alike have received job offers and been paid for weeks of work based on connections here.
Why do I have to sign up?
Everything on the internet requires an account. Even Facebook. You just forgot that you signed up for it 15 years ago.
What is Logik up to and why should I care?
The global pandemic exposed a critical lack of support and infrastructure for Flame artists across the globe. As we retreated to our homes for ‘a few weeks of work from home’, it quickly became clear that what we do, how we do it, how we communicate, and how we advance in our careers needed to evolve. As our work dried up, Andy used Logik as a means to share information so we could sharpen our tools and be ready for when work returned. Inspired by his passion, I reached out to Andy and for months we brainstormed about building a community and creating a sustainable powerful platform upon which to lift Flame artists. We created the Forums in August of 2020.
Additionally, with the untimely passing of many members of our community over the last few years, it became crystal clear that a long and lasting and transformational legacy cannot survive upon the shoulders and donated time and tools of a select few. The foundations of our community were built by people that truly gave a shit about Flame and its users and we owe it to them to evolve in modern and helpful ways.
Why is it necessary to turn off Logik on Facebook? Isn’t that selfish and greedy?
Andy and I have spent the last 15 months fiercely debating this topic and assure you that this decision was not taken lightly. It’s important to recognize that Facebook isn’t designed to build, sustain, and grow communities. It’s designed to harvest your eyeball time for ad impressions. That’s it. It’s precisely designed to provide you a small dopamine rush whilst you scroll endlessly past pictures of kitty cats and political pundits. By nature the information it provides to you is surface-level…disposable…temporary…all so that you will log back in in a few minutes so they can serve you more ads. That creates an entirely different experience and if you’ve ever had to search for something you saw a few days ago, you’re gonna have a bad time. Again, Facebook isn’t designed for the long term easy access storage of helpful information for its users. It’s goal is to have your eyeballs glued to its feed.
Yes, shutting down Facebook is selfish. We are trying to make our lives easier by consolidating our platforms such that the limited time we have to do what we do reaches farther. But selfishness isn’t a bad thing when we all want the same thing. Believe it or not we are all on the same team. Am I selfish if I want to go home on time or get paid more for working less or solve problems faster or make better looking pictures? I don’t think anybody would describe that as selfish. Do you want the same thing? Good. Me too.
Finally, consolidating all of our platforms means we can leverage silly things like page views, statistics, user signups and activity levels to get major corporations to get excited about and invest in our community like never before.
Are you going to charge for the Forums?
The forums are free and will be free forever. It’s just like a library. if you need to know something, there will always be a place to go where you can to get the self help you need from strangers sharing what they know when they can.
But, sometimes that isn’t enough. Sometimes you need one on one time, a tutor. And tutoring isn’t free. If it was free it wouldn’t be very good and I’d have failed math like 5 times already. Sometimes its necessary to work with an expert to move your situation forward. From accounting and taxes to DIY to home renos to IT to healthcare. We do it everyday in our lives. It’s normal and helpful to ask for help. So we’re beginning to experiment in that field because our community asked for it.
Why do you have a Patreon page?
We have a Patreon page because members of our community asked for it. In the early days of Logik, the members of this community felt inspired by the new energy of Logik.tv and noticed what was needed and wondered what they could do to help. Flame artists contacted us, thanked us, and got involved. Some artists wanted to create educational videos. Some artists wanted to share their stories or their projects. Some artists wanted to create networking opportunities for others. Some artists wanted to try ridiculous live events like Renderdome Some artists were just too busy but gave a shit and decided to share monetarily.
The Patreon page is not designed to take your money and line our pockets with it. Trust me, if we were
interested in getting rich I wouldn’t be clamoring for your fivers and tenners. I’d be a colorist instead. Or I’d be banging down the door of your scheduling department. Andy and I are working Flame artists just like you. We have the same challenges you do. We face the same difficult clients you do. We get stitched up the same way you do. The Patreon page means its a little easier to stay up late prepping some more for a Logik Live or spending our old commuting time organizing and tagging posts on the forums.
The Patreon page is more importantly designed to begin to normalize the notion that our community is filled with people that need stuff and people that have stuff. And that’s it. When you can create a normalcy where the havers and the needers can come together and trade, that’s a beautiful thing. And that has been a foreign concept within our community for decades and desperately needs to change if we are going to have the legacy we deserve.
What do you do with the money you earn?
We pay our bills. Our current costs are approximately:
Forums = $150/mo. Our forum is a professionally hosted and managed Discourse server, provided by Discourse.org. With our current traffic, we pay on average $150 per month, maybe a little bit less in the summer when traffic is lower.
Websites/domain names/hosting fees for Logik.tv and One Frame of White = $50/mo
Zoom Rooms = $15/mo.
Shipping costs = $100/mo. Everything that Andy gives away on Logik Live means he has to take a trip to the post office and ship something somewhere, usually to @johnag g in Australia. Andy shipped dozens of batteries across the world at $15 a pop and countless masks, waterbottles, fanny packs, and tshirts. 
Discord Nitro = $100. I spent $100 boosting our Discord server so we could have 1080p screen shares and some custom emojis.
Content = market rates (ish!). We are thankfully now able to pay artists for their time in making content for you. How cool is that? Believe me, we know how valuable your time is. We want to offer you high quality, high impact content so that you can get what you need quickly. Logik Academy is only just beginning but could be really great someday.
EDITED LATER AND ADDED BY ANDY MILKIS
(From Andy)
"Yes, we have a monetized YouTube channel. Since April of 2020 it has generated $134.09. That’s after 66 eps of Logik Live, 2 Renderdomes and Logik Academy. That’s over 100 hours of original content for $134.09. Our merch store has generated $155.84 since opening it up in August. I’ve given away far more merch than has been purchased, and those funds come from things like Patreon, which is the community. When I say that this has been a labor of love, I hope that these numbers help to clarify that. We have also been very fortunate, as Randy has said, to be able to start to pay artists to produce content. All of this has been free to everyone. No one has been forced to pay for anything, regardless of how it may look from the outside.
For a typical ep of Logik Live I spend an hour during the week doing a run-through with the guest, a couple of hours on Saturday prepping and then 4-5 hours on Sunday for the show and Q&A. And that is just Logik Live. That doesn’t take into account the podcasts, the Forum, and yes, Logik on Facebook. For a little more clarity on the engagement that we have been getting here on the Facebook group, my post announcing that we were going to freeze it garnered 57 likes/loves/dislikes, etc. 57. It was ‘seen’ by 1300 people, and only 57 engaged with it. Of those, there was 1 angry and 2 wow. the rest were like, love and care. I am eternally grateful to everyone who helped get this going and keep it going, but trust me when I say that it takes a ton of work to keep it growing. No one every asked me to do any of this, I just saw a need and decided to do it. Just like no one asked J to start it, or Ivar to make all of those shaders for free, or @julik to host it, or Mike V to make the Logik Portal, or for any of the artists around the world to host in person user groups. We all just stepped up and did it. I have seen several proclamations of “Why not give the FB group to someone else to run?” but no one has said “I’ll do it.”
To answer the question of “Why not keep the Facebook group going without moderation?” If a community is stagnant it dies. We all know this. How many other groups are you a part of that get stagnant? Just look at the data: The FB group has been declining. The community off Facebook is exploding. This is a great thing! All day yesterday there were people on Logik Discord sharing their Flame screen while they worked. It was like an all-day, global user group - something that isn’t possible on FB. Keeping a dying FB group would be horrible for Logik. The last thing we would ever want is for someone to show up here and see that there haven’t been new posts in a while, etc. Yes, there are 4000 “users” on this group, but a post is rarely seen by more than 1,000. Seen just means it’s in their feed as they scroll by. It’s very rare that we get more than 50 actual engagements on a post. That’s a 1% engagement rate. You’re not growing a community with a 1% engagement rate. We’ve hit a wall here on FB and it’s been that way for a while. FB is designed to keep this from the user by constantly bombarding you with new stuff."
(end of Andy’s message)
I might be forgetting something, but, that’s about it. The rest goes into a business checking account. Thanks to our supporters, we have a few thousand bucks in it. That begins to change our mindset completely. It means that between bookings as a freelancer I can legitimately invest in the community instead of feeling desperate to take on a paid booking. Eventually it means amazing things like holding in-person events like user groups, trips to the pub, outings, and field trips. It means that one day we could provide grants or scholarships or donate cloud workstation instances for students or working artists. It means one day maybe providing legitimate higher education alternatives to insanely priced fine art school. It means one day hiring a Matchbox developer to create tools for us. It means one day hiring a Python developer for providing open-source Flame tools. It means one day offering technical and IT support for the independent artists.
Flame-News was so great. Why can’t we bring that back?
Don’t forget Flame-News was an archaic and miserable platform. You couldn’t post a picture! It’s value wasn’t in what it was, but how it made you feel. It connected you to the community. It helped you solve that problem that almost kept you from missing that thing with the guy and the place. It made you feel…human. And we’re as passionate as anyone about making sure that happens as often as possible for as many of you as possible here. @Mbemigh and the late great Jeff Heusser gave birth to Flame-News decades ago on an email server. Whilst Jeff is no longer with us, @Mbemigh is a friend of the Logik community and is constantly reminding us of those early days so we remember where we came from.
We’re asking for your help.
We are asking for your help so that we can help you more easily, more often, and in more ways than ever before. You don’t have to use it, you don’t have to like it. All we ask is that you don’t make it harder for us to help those that have asked for it.
Thank you.
@andymilkis and @randy
Fun fact. This is us at one of the only two times we’ve ever met in person.
Love my cat videos, just put them in “between renders” and create a custom optional tag and chug them.