Where are the Junior Flame Artists?

Flame Career
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Thanks, Sinan — but a lack of mentorship is only half the battle. It’s less of a pain now that the internet can teach you so much.

The bigger issue is that salaries just aren’t keeping up with the cost of living, and clients aren’t willing to pay more for a Flame Artist. In their mind, if something can be done on “free” software like Resolve, why pay extra for a costly Flame subscription and the overhead of Linux engineers? And honestly, you can understand their point of view.

But here’s the problem: the cost of living in London is now absurd. I started my career in the regions and, though the salary was lower, the quality of life was higher. Unfortunately, in the UK, Flame is almost exclusively London-based — and the salary simply doesn’t justify the lifestyle trade-off.

Here’s what my monthly budget looked like as a starving Junior Flame Artist in London:

Monthly income: £2,625.00 (pocket change)

Monthly expenses:
Tax: £441.70 (government theft)
Rent: £1,200.00 (rats, mould and bed bugs come free!)
Transport: £293.40 (to pay for cushy train driver salaries)
Pension contribution: £78.75 (this will come in handy if I make it to pensionable age)
Phone/internet: £25.00 (not like there’s ever any signal in Central London anyway)
Food: £300.00 (even Pot Noodles are expensive these days)
Toiletries/clothes/cleaning/miscellaneous: £100 (I miss working in my pyjamas)

Leftover after basic expenses: £186.15

Not much left at the end of the month. You’re just about keeping your head above water — and your soul intact. I used to swipe biscuits and fruit from the client bowl just to shave a few quid off my food bill.

And sure, in Hollywood there’s a culture of film workers sleeping in their cars when the industry goes quiet. But I’m just not into that kind of nonsense. That’s not a career. That’s torture.

All through my time in London I kept thinking that I’d be financially better off pursuing a career of giving handjobs behind a bus stop instead. My clients would have been happier too! :rofl:

I just don’t see young people these days choosing this profession when they’re faced with low salaries, continued outsourcing to India, and the looming threat of AI. Yes, there are a handful of folks hanging on, but the Flame user base will continue to shrink unless Autodesk comes up with a radical plan — like giving away Flame for free.

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Is this just a flame problem or an industry problem covering vfx as a whole though? Were your nuke peers getting better pay or treatment? Sometimes regarding outsourcing for instance it feels like with margins what they are in VFX as vendors are getting squeezed for more and more for less money, or even if its the same number of shots, an arbitrary dismissal from clients of the idea that you might get what you pay for and you can’t afford perfection, VFX feels like its in a rough place. And I think there are a lot of folks that feel like with the plane crashing all we can do is hope for a safe enough landing but there’s no real opportunity while careening towards the mountain range to redesign the airplane so that in the future it doesn’t slam into the ground. I think you end up with, and I’m not saying this maliciously, some short-sighted thinking by necessity because there is always an immediate crisis regarding margins and profit and future reliable income always over the horizon that is taking up all the oxygen. But that’s going to have a cost. You need juniors in order to have future seniors. It bums me out immensely. I wish there were more junior artists. I love teaching and mentoring when I have the opportunity.

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Hey, thanks for asking!

It’s not just a VFX problem — it’s a wider post-production issue in the UK. Zeb actually wrote a piece about it in Televisual earlier this year: Exploitation in Post Production: The Human Cost - Televisual

The facility I worked for handled the whole pipeline — offline, online, grade, dub, and delivery. We were often asked to do VFX, but that wasn’t our main focus. Most of our work came from documentary, true crime, and indie drama. Not particularly VFX-heavy — just the usual online fixes.

As damning as that report was, the “Flame Facility” I worked for in London wasn’t even the worst post house I’ve been in — not by a long shot.

In the two years I spent there, the facility shed around 10–15 juniors across different departments (machine room, online, grade, dub, etc.). All left in search of better pay, and most were never replaced. Any extra work was simply piled onto the (long suffering) seniors.

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