Personally I would just submit your name to every possible opening or opportunity, it’s a numbers game. If you’re willing to work very hard and have some talent, then the numbers/probability eventually will hit.
The first real job I took in this I had imposter’s syndrome every day. But you grow into it.
The main point - it can be done. There are many on the forum here who support families, have bought houses, send kids to college - all earned with Flame work. It may take more than a year to reach your first $100K, but if you’e determined enough it is not irrational. It would take a lot of sweat, but that is what many of us do. Just be motivated to prove it.
Once upon a time I worked with a proper genius.
He used to four wall the paintbox room at ITV (I think it was called ITN at the time).
He would take the profit from that and buy cocaine in London and then sell it to his dons at Cambridge where he was mastering in physics.
He used this money to buy his first Porsche Turbo.
While at Cambridge he wrote the equivalent of Paintbox that ran on a Mac II.
The money he saved from his VFX/Drug dealing meant that he could buy Queen’s Counsel and avoid a prison sentence from the inevitable Quantel/Apple lawsuit.
This is an easy path to follow if you’re clever - but I’m dumb as a pile of bricks and poor as a church mouse.
Precisely. OP knows this. It’s a thought experiment.
Don’t take it too seriously @alan. It’s a conversation starter.
Our business is messy. Super messy. Making custom widgets that nobody has ever made before for customers who don’t know if they want a wadget or a wedget or a widget unit they see it means our work doesn’t scale well or translate at all to other more typical business models. There are no certifications, no degrees in Flame, nuthin like that.
There are three types of power one can possess.
Definition: Role power comes from the specific role or position a person holds within an organization or group. It is often linked to the responsibilities and authority granted by that role.
Examples:
Characteristics:
Definition: Relationship power is based on the interpersonal relationships and networks a person has. It comes from the influence one can exert through connections, trust, and rapport with others.
Examples:
Characteristics:
Definition: Knowledge power is derived from the expertise, skills, and knowledge a person possesses. It is the influence one has due to their specialized understanding or mastery of a subject or process.
Examples:
Characteristics:
The weakest of these powers is that which is provided by your Role. The strongest of these powers is that which is provided by the Relationships you possess. The other, of course, is what you know.
Clients will always trade first on trust. They have to have experienced you delivering exceptional work or know someone they trust who has. Without said trust, they will be the next trade on your client list. Do you work for clients they trust? Do they respect the creative work of those clients? And finally, they trade on what you know.
A recommendation, a client list, a showreel, a website, a LinkedIn profile, and a director’s treatment are all different methodologies by which clients decide who is the best artist to serve their project.
Are a significant number of Flame Artists doing it remotely, as of today? I would think those numbers are rising. After all, what part of this job requires my body being in a certain location on the globe? Everything is on the screens.
Relocating is only worth the hassle for me if it significantly (like night and day difference) increases my chances of getting steady work. Or do Flame Artists ever land the job first and then receive a relocation stipend. Does that happen very much at all for Flame Artists?
Interesting premise. I figure you’re from the US. Then you’ve got a head start being from a first world country. US and continental Europe+UK has a strong post production market.
If you are in post production, which I presume you are, “uncertainties surrounding career viability in such a specialized niche.” would apply for other software as well, in my opinion. But yeah, Flame is a niche within a niche.
Depends a little on your age as well. I started when I was really young doing whatever was available wherever. Didn’t have the luxury to choose, hailing from the back waters of (insert third world country). Perseverence is key I believe, like any production position, experience will make you better.
When you say your first 10K, do you mean when you can put it in your savings or the first 10K you earn? Again, depends A LOT where you’re earning that 10K.
Regarding your last question:
As Flame artists we used to rule the room. This, of course, was back in the day when directors/producers spent hours if not days in our suites. There are many here who would tell stories of sessions where weird things happened. Nowadays, most of the senior artists have gone freelance/remote. But there are still some occasions where we are the front facing, last stand of the production during client sessions, defending the castle against the hordes (too dramatic? yeah I’m one of the old farts here)
Best of luck
If the aim is to get to $10K quickly then I would recommend changing careers and become a supermodel. Linda Evangelista said “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day” and that was almost 30 years ago. Once you factor in inflation, you could probably earn $10K in half a day and $100K in a week.
I hope that helps!
That is fallacy too many fall in.
Primarily you should charge what the task is worth not who is doing it, and secondarily a premium for the eye and experience of the operator.
If you are paying for an in-person sessions and then it becomes obvious that you’re not well practiced because you’re looking around for tools or Google how to do something, then yes, this becomes a problem.
But when most work is offline/remote, as long as you can get the work done up to the expected standard and in the time promised, it doesn’t matter how often you Google something or you talk to someone on Discord. And if you take 3 times as long, you’re effective rate may in fact be $60, but that’s on you, not the person paying for the task.
Your eye and judgement is another matter. More junior people may feel like a shot is done, when there is more that can be refined and maybe the client expects more refinement.
The reason this is a fallacy, is that in recent years we’ve seen it become easier to enter new skills without coming up the old way up the ladder and learning from seniors. So if you come in and charge $60 or $80 for a task which in the old system you may not have tackled until year 5 or after, you lower the price floor in the market and train customers that the task they may have paid $200 for just the week before, could be had for $60. And suddenly everything is a race to the bottom.
So you either have to let people charge traditional rates, even if they haven’t had traditional career paths, or you end up destroying the market for everyone. Alternatively you can just yell at those people to get off your pad, that they don’t deserve to be there unless they roto’ed stuff for a few years.
This discussion has played out so many times in different industries and always gets people worked up. Go look at commercial photography which is paid on usage, not hours spent. Too many new comers charged by the hour and mostly destroyed the industry.
Personally I think it’s great that people want to enter different fields and are eager to learn. It’s worth embracing, but lets also teach them good business practices and make sure the tide rises for everyone and stop creating sink holes.
We’ll just have to disagree then. No harm.
The tensions of working in a field that lives in the triangle of art, commerce and technology.
Wow. I feel like I could save on my winter heating bills just by reading this thread.
If you mean new to Flame - I’ve been working in Flame for 2+ years. I’m very upfront about that.
If you mean new to Flame type of work? No. I’ve been around this type of work for many more years and have a long list of happy clients that pay me well.
If you mean new to art & commerce? No, been around that for 30 years.
If you mean new to business? Not all. I’ve been around a lot of very senior folks over the years. I’ve managed a $4B demand channel for a very well known company, among other things.
Clearly you take a lot of pride in your Flame experience. Respect for that.
For me me Flame is a very practical tool that lets me deliver work to clients that they appreciate and value. And gives me a premium income opportunity. I respect Flame as an excellent software package with a rich history and a well respected community that has pushed boundaries for 30 years.
And I think this will be the end of the conversation for me. Clearly we have different views, this is not about a competition or convincing one or the other. We have one thing in common, we use Flame, we enjoy it, and it makes us successful in our own ways.
Cheers!
You’d be much better served as a junior to be in an environment in which you are in physical proximity to other more senior flame artists. Literally looking over people’s shoulders is an invaluable experience. This is my opinion of course, but you’ll learn much more quickly and efficiently. And yes I think it would improve your chances of steady work.
I think the thing getting people’s feathers ruffled is the “speed run” component of your post. There’s an aspect of your post that reads like looking for the life hacks that can take you from zero to 100k in just twelve months! And I don’t think that exists in this field. It’s a combination of aptitude, attitude, right place right time, and the people you know. Just like anything else really.
At the end of the day, once your foot is in the door, your skills are what’s important and there aren’t a lot of questions about that in your post. Like your cart seems miles ahead of your horse. Need to kick ass to get paid. Can’t kick ass if can’t do. Can’t do if haven’t learned. You have to devour every piece of information. And beyond that, really try to understand what that information is and how you can really apply it beyond rote memorization of which buttons to click. This is a problem solving field. And the more problems you’ve solved, and the deeper knowledge of how you solved those problems and how to translate that into future problems is paramount to being good at this. Talking about social platforms and booking clients without being able to crush a flame booking seems premature.
Exactly, and charging less doesn’t even land you more work. In my experience, raising my rates has always made it easier to find work. If you err on the side of being overpriced, you’ll know quite soon because it’s hard to find work. If you err on the lower side, your rates could be locked in for months at a time while signaling a race to the bottom. We should all be discouraging this kind of signaling.
Testing out a 50% increase in your rate every quarter should be seen like eating your vegetables. I’m seeing people from India with healthier rates and hoping the overseas crowd keeps testing the waters. Since this career path has uniquely inherent risks, what our clients pay for is not just the deliverable. Our compensation today should reflect the risk of obsolescence 10-20 years down the road.
When people say things like “I just charge what I think is fair,” they often don’t realize what fairness means in a world where AI (among many things) can spoil the whole pot. ‘Fair’ would be more like $1000/hr so you could save a nest egg in 2 years. That’s really what I think a person competent with Nuke, Houdini, or Flame deserves. And the closer the AI threat looms, the higher the value, all the way to the point of obsolescence.
Do I think the freelance VFX community knows their own value enough to stand for this? I don’t know, but the Flame community seems like the harbinger of sensibility. If we signal a race to the bottom, others hear it, and before long we all get robbed. And just because our rates have been normalized, it doesn’t mean they represent our actual value.
I agree that my rate of $80/hr. is relatively low. My excuse is that when you see the majority of ‘Senior’ VFX artists on Upwork charging $80/hr, it just looks like the thing to do. Almost no Houdini artists have as high as $150/hr on their profile. I’m going to make amends by doubling my rate while working on my website for the next couple of months. I’m prepared for 1-2 years of no new clients, but have a feeling I won’t have trouble landing work through LinkedIn or my website.
If a platform has a culture of racing to the bottom, the best you can do is leave it on read while sending a strong message. I won’t waste my time sending proposals anymore on Upwork until I see hourly rates in the hundreds per hour normalized. It would benefit the entire VFX community if everyone who doesn’t have an Upwork account (especially Flame Artists), makes one, sets a rate in the hundreds on their profile, and leaves it. I’m seeing more people wise up to the fact that you don’t have to (nor should you) start low. My very first Houdini job paid $3K for a few hours of work. I didn’t even start getting responses from potential clients until I raised my rate to $80/hr.
My strategy for the rest of 2024 is to set the price to upper extremes, work on inbound marketing (regularly posted promo shorts on LinkedIn), and let them come to me. If Adobe wants to make prompt ‘artists’ out of marketing execs, then any VFX artist worth their salt will need to upgrade their title to Founder & Creative Director of their own production house. Every client of mine that ever had a substantial budget contacted me out of the blue. Anyone with over $10K to spend is actively headhunting for talent, not waiting to be approached.
Maybe speedrun wasn’t the best word for me to use in the title 
I was looking more for a re-enactment of someone doing all the right career moves and allocating time to optimal priorities on a clean slate. I do think if something is worth doing, it doesn’t matter how long it takes – I’m all in.
@Retopo001 - good work and a good contribution.
For perspective, when the software gods are on your side, you can get a blessed configuration up and running within 45 minutes.
My limited experience of cloud instances was between 5-15 minutes.