Enough of this endless promo of Academy here guys.
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All press is good press.
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Not until it annoys the shit out of Alan.
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Geez guys. Cut me some slack. Happy Friday you savages.
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Actually, thanks to my stellar Chat GPT skills, Iāve been able to configure so everybody gets a nice and small banner except for @ALan and @GPM.
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It is now a thing of beauty.
At least sign up for a month now that youāve art directed the shit outta my advertising.
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Is it just me, or is it growing with each new page view?
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sorry for my ignorance but is this an app now @randy ? can we have Elixir type of currency to pay for AndyDills comments? Ill have to collect more to get a real good zinger!
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Only for anyone that complains about someone trying to do something nice for Flame Artists.
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I love the artistās use of the colour black.
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I would like the banner to animate and generate this sound please.
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Kittens and lasers would be pretty rad.
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I fully support the idea. I have gotten one of our juniors on to it.
I am guessing that the courses take a fair amount of time to prep and present and it helps Logik compensate the teachers for their time and support the framework setup to host such materials.
As @randy said 
ājust doing something nice for Flame Artistsā
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Yes, at first glance, there does appear to be some overlap. From my perspective, and, this is also because I am a horrid marketer (see the title of this topic), in reality the different services we provide are meant to build and support a wide variety of uses and users. Iāll try to keep this quick.
The Forums are our library. Anybody can stroll in for free, find the information they want, maybe itās helpful to them, maybe itās not. Anybody can participate, anyone can ask anything, and maybe what they say is helpful or true, maybe itās not. Just like picking up a book in a library. But a library isnāt a community. Itās a particular type of resource. Libraries remain quiet and focused to reduce noise and distractions. Free forever, costs Logik $400/mo to maintain.
Enter, Discord. Discord is our cafeā¦our coffee shopā¦our pub. Itās disposable content and shouldnāt be Googleable and indexable and searchable. Heck, every 48 hours I could delete the entire contents of the Discord and people would still come in and tell Andy heās muted or have @PlaceYourBetts tell Dad jokes. Itās a place where Iāve formed deep and meaningful relationships with Flame Artists on 6 continents. And itās free forever. Costs Logik about $50/mo with moderation plugins, Nitro Boosts so we can screen share in HD 60fps and have 256kbit audio, and a few other things that help me moderate it in my spare time.
Our Patreon exists because Flame Artists asked for it. They want to participate in the building and supporting of our community, but they are too busy or would rather do something else with their precious free time so they throw some cash our way. In return we give them a bit more access to help them on their way and send them schwag, and as a way to say thanks I took a week off of paid work and spent close to $5,000 designing, manufacturing, and shipping almost 200 Logik Challenge Coins to 6 continents.
After 2.5 years of having the pleasure of sitting in on about 100 Logik Lives and maybe 75 Patrons Only Q&As, and hearing common threads from the 34,000 Forum posts Iāve read over 400 hours, the number one question on peopleās minds is education and what do we do to grow junior artists in our profession. And I got tired of talking about it. So I researched educational platforms, joined several other small business and design/agency educational services, paid thousands of dollars out of pocket to have access to others that have done similar things, researched video hosting and AI based closed captioning, talked to hundreds of Flame artists and listened to what their challenges were and how they thought we could solve this challenge.
And then Grant Kay became available. I immediately jumped at the chance to pay him and 7 other Flame Artists a Flame Artist hourly wage to do their thing and created Logik Academy Pro. Each professor provides 3-4 hours of instruction per month, plus probably spends 5-10 hours prepping materials. Iāve spent about a hundred hours building automations from Zoom to Circle (the platform on which Logik Academy Pro rests), to Discourse (the platform on which Logik Forums rests), Linkedin, to Zoom which is our virtual meeting platforms, and Wistia, which hosts and serves the 50 hours of Logik Academy Pro content and provides transcoding and bandwidth/CDN services for our students across 5 continents.
Early feedback has been really promising. People are showing up, engaging, asking for content, and they get that content sometimes as early as the next week. Weāre also mentoring artists of all levels and skillsets, and helping them through difficult transitions in their career.
Weāve had classes on VFX Supervision, Nuke for Flame Artists, Midjourney for Flame Artists, Cleanup Techniques, Mocha roto and tracking, deep dives into color science and Mac OS color management, life coaching from a certified life coach and Flame Artist, and we even snuck in 4 amazing classes on Gmask Tracer and 3D Keyer whilst we had Grant Kay with us.
In just 2 months, weāve put out over 38 events, with about 40 hours of content available for instant replay. And weāre creating original, high quality content from working Flame Artists to the tune of 10-20 hours per month.
$89 per month is on par with other platforms like ours, and is less than the price of a monthly yoga membership.
Last month Logik Academy Pro had $2,965 in costs and wages. I didnāt take a salary. Weāre trying to save up so Andy and I can fly to Vegas for NAB and rent a suite to throw a party for Flame Artists because nobody else wants to.
So I figured Iād learn a little HTML and CSS on the flight back from a shoot instead of watching Real Housewives like any sane VFX Supe would so I could create an ad, on a platform I administrate, for my own product, designed to help Flame Artists. And that color happened to be red. Our brand color. And within 8 hours got complaints about the stinking color and layout.
And the change in the color on the Forums was not to align with Autodesk or ābe on brand.ā You give me far too much credit. I mistakenly deleted a color theme profile for the site when I was fucking around trying to piss off Alan and Iāll get to fixing it eventually. Right after I get off my soap box.
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It definitely fits in the overall Logik portfolio and is a good answer to the question that kept coming up as Randy said about who teaches the juniors. As with anything, it may take some time time to settle into place. And is a shit-ton of work, especially if you do it on top of your regular work. Randy deservers credit for pulling that off.
It has been a bit noisy. In the 9 months Iāve been on Logik weāve gone from just a forum to a whole lot different platforms and formats that do have some overlap. Takes a lot more effort to keep up with, remember what is where, and also the constant change. Every few weeks things are different, just when you had settled into some rhythm. Especially if that is only one of many other communities youāre part of.
Grant was a huge win for Logik, and someone we didnāt have access to before like that. The rest of the classes are great, but it can seem like youāre talking to the same people you chit chat on Discord all day long and may have gotten some of the same answers for free leaving some confusion behind understandably. That may need some more tweaking, or more teachers who arenāt regulars.
I think Pro is a great resource for those having a steep learning curve ahead. For those who are just interested in specific topics or have more schedule conflicts, it may be helpful to have a price point where you can either buy a number of class credits on demand, or a lower price point that has more limited access. Itās a little binary right now.
My $0.02
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I would be interested in being able to buy classes a la carte. I understand that this is essentially the same price point as FXPHD now, but I also wish FXPHD had a la carte options. I personally grow tired of every single thing in my life turning into a premium subscription model in which everything is packaged together. This is the way things are going and I donāt blame people for utilizing it, itās nothing unique and if it works it works. But for me, some type of a la carte option (or token model as @allklier mentioned above) would be more likely to get me involved in some way.
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