You’re absolutely right. I’m not suggesting that autodesk has anything to crow about. If anything their product strategy where discreet was concerned was simply less self-immolating than the other guys (I drafted a whole essay about Toxik in my original reply, but it was way too insane to post, which is saying something). It just seems to me like all the other guys failed while autodesk and the senior discreet product strategy folks were figuring out what to do.
Welcome to my blog, by the way.
My last tour as showreel editor was in 2005, when the NAB booth would for the first time be branded with Autodesk signage, and Discreet would disappear, officially. It was the only time I ever sensed any pressure that The Reel had some purpose beyond showcasing great work and jazzing up the user group crowd. This year had to be a giant, balls-to-the-wall fireworks show that would tell everyone that the company on which they had staked their futures was not going anywhere.
If this were Apple or Adobe, a hundred people would spend a year figuring out what to do, but for some reason it was just me, a freelancer in a poorly ventilated room above an Italian restaurant, trying to find some combination of music and graphics that would convince everyone in VFX that the party wasn’t over yet. After banging my head against the wall for, I dunno, a week, I stumbled across a Marilyn Manson cover of Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, so I slapped it up against a chill but vaguely menacing Michael Buble video, cut in ten or fifteen seconds of the most intense clips we had, and walked away for the night without logging out of Smoke.
I came in the next day (late, likely hung over) to find the marketing folks standing in front of my machine, wide-eyed, but enthusiastic. The consensus was that this was what should be done, but it probably wouldn’t be allowed to be done. I kept looking for other tracks, but knew that nothing else was going to make the point they needed to make. I think we even cut an alt version, which would have been a first, but to everyone’s surprise, Personal Jesus was permitted, and the booth crew in Vegas had the pleasure of enduring my audio assault every twenty minutes for four days. Sorry everyone.
My point is that autodesk, while an unwelcome and often unstable steward of our beloved software, has always understood the prestige value of Flame. They have rarely acted well on that understanding (not mentioning Flame in a software release email to Flame artists is a facepalm moment for the ages), and it is without question that they could be doing more to promote the software and increase its adoption, but in a weird way their detached fecklessness might just be the one thing that’s kept Flame around when so many of its competitors have withered and died, or been executed prematurely.
Maybe the last year has warped my perception, but it feels like Flame is in a better position now than it’s been in a long time, and it’s not because of autodesk. It’s because we’ve kept using it, kept learning, kept up with all the fun things Fred and Stephane and Will and Yann have put in there for us, and when shit went down, we continued to deliver.
