Hi Everyone,
I think this might be my first post here since I generally really only lurk and read but I figured this might be a topic I could contribute to since I am currently a Junior Flame Artist.
I agree with a lot of posters here. Looking at my own experience as a Junior Flame Artist and before that a Flame Assistant, it’s more than just roto and cleanup at this point but being given shots to work on whether it was just to roto them or work on them to completion has served an invaluable learning experience for me to become much more comfortable with Flame and learning new techniques to problems I may have not yet tackled before. These shots allowed me stumble, to fail and delete my entire batch and start again, to spin my wheels and eventually complete to satisfaction but through it all learn.
I was fortunate enough to be able to grow a solid foundation of post by scoring a internship at a post-production house right out of college which where I grew and learned for five years working my way up from Intern to Junior Assistant Editor to 3rd or 2nd Assistant Editor to Lead Assistant Editor to even Online Editor on a few Netflix documentaries. Needless to say, those five years were formative in understanding the fundamentals of post-production and seeing the process from first media ingestion to final delivery many times over. It wasn’t until I saw the work of a freelance Flame Artist where it sparked my interest of actually learning this mysterious program then known to me as “Smoke”. This led to me spending about two years or so of learning on my own going through tutorials on the Smoke Learning Channel with Grant Kay by my side and taking time to use Smoke when the room wasn’t busy and I had free time. I even got friendly with a few of the freelance Flame Artists and on a few occasions I was able to sit in their rooms for a bit when I wasn’t busy just to watch them work. When I left that company to step into the shoes of a Flame Assistant I had a solid understanding of the post production process, conform and was well versed in all the major NLEs out there given my assistant editorial background.
Now in my Flame Assistant role, it was an invaluable experience to finally just be surrounded by Flame daily and have a person that is way more skilled than I to come to with questions I cannot find the answer to. The work I was given as I mentioned was incredibly useful in both teaching me new techniques and figuring out the answers to the problems that they posed. The shots helped my confidence in actually using Flame and figuring out “my style” of how I like to work in Flame. Of course that was not the bread and butter of the position. I passed over many elements to and from the artist, made a lot of postings, QC’ed, read a bunch of spec sheets, delivered spots as well as catalogued many archives and masters. Basically, I found my job to be similar to my assistant editorial role, where I took care of the technical/mundane stuff around the NLE or in this instance the Flame which allowed the artist to focus on the creative tasks at hand. However, I relied on my fundamentals learned at my previous company to coast me through it so none of this other work was foreign to me outside of actually learning more of Flame.
Aside from my Flame Assistant responsibilities, I worked in my free time on tech-related projects around the office such as creating and integrating Linux servers, updating the Flame workstations, as well as some other projects since I naturally was always into computer tinkering. Eventually, raising my skills in Flame and proving I was computer-savvy, I was offered to step into my current Junior Flame Artist and Assistant Engineer position where I do everything that I did prior but also I am at times given entire projects in Flame to handle from beginning to end as well as being my “own Flame Assist” where I export the masters and then also do the deliverables that the client needs. However, I am also now further integrated in working with the IT Engineer in the office where we both tackle the tech projects in the office like setting up the new gateway, network switches and cable runs on the network, upgrading the edit rooms or even bringing up our VPN at the facility. With these additional responsibilities, I’m able to actually understand how the facility works networking-wise, both with what goes on inside our gateway and how the VLANs are split out to how the actual traffic goes out from the gateway and splits off to the switches and eventually routed to the machines.
So, I guess you can say I’ve adapted the role and made it into my own variation where I do spend my time in Flame but also pursue my other interests in the tech side of things to fill in where it is needed. As others have mentioned the roto and cleanup work was fantastic in me learning Flame but having that solid foundation of post-production prior to that really turned me into a much more well-rounded person to be more capable to the task at hand.