Flash on the beach - Day 3
Ok to complete the set here is a review of all the stuff I saw on Wednesday and the final session on Tuesday.
Tuesday 8pm
Rober Hodgin
This is a bit of a strange one for Flash on the Beach as he hasn’t used Flash for quite some time and now mostly uses an open source compiler called processing. His work is mostly visualisers for music and the stuff really blows you away. The work pulses and explodes in time to the music and is all rendered on the fly in time to the music. It was the kind of work that makes all but the most talented designers/coders feel inferior. You can see some of his work on his vimeo gallery.
The Party
There was then a party in the Honey Club down on the sea front, which didn’t turn out to have many honeys, just geeks. There were burlesque dancers and a musician, not sure why. The £1 a bottle beer ran out within 2 hours so I moved on elsewhere.
Wednesday
Seb Lee-Delise - Simplifying Papervision 3D
3D work is some of the most interesting stuff going on in Flash at then moment and the session was designed to give new users of the framework nice easy entry points to start using it. He went through some really simple examples which involved the earth, ping pong and a cow floating in space. The source code was also supplied so we can can do some stuff with the cow ourselves. So now I’m expecting Hiro to to do great things in the next few months using Papervision.
Neil Webb - Cairngorn for beginners
Flex is an alternative method for creating large technical projects for the Flash platform and Cairngorn is an Architectural framework endorsed by Adobe. A bit over my head but was interested to see how a Flex project is set up and how a framework can help with the process.
Andre Michelle - Adobe made some noise
This guy is a nutcase! Using the new AS3 sound model he has completely created a Roland 303 the classic sequencerer from the 80’s. The site has central mixer which you plug components into including the 303, he has a demo on his blog.
Rob Chiu (AKA The Ronin) - Intentionally left blank
Another strange one for FOTB but still amazing. He is one of, if not the best motion graphics short ident designers out there. Was really interesting to see the freeform way that he works and the collaborative approach he has with his sound designer. The work is lovely and well worth a look if you can stand to wait for it to chug down our 56k broadband connection.
Paul Bateman - the ying and yang of Flash
This was a chance to see what is involved in the upcoming Flash CS4 Application and Flash 10 player. The app has lots of really nice new features for Flash designers including a completely re-written tween engine which will make animation much easier to set up and edit, as well as new trick that we could never have thought of before. It was interesting to hear from the head developer on the Flash player and to get an idea of how the team work over at Adobe. Some of the new abilities within the player will give us designers some really nice new toys to play with.
Richard Harris - Beyond Flash
Well what can I say about this guy? Certainly for me it was a case of the best came last. He has don some amazing work over the last 5 or so years.
Starting with Word count which trawls the web and counts the usage of words in the English speaking websites of the world, it then orders them by popularity. He then did something similar for photos with 10×10 by keeping a record of photos that represent what was happening on any given day since 2004. Probably his best known work is WeFeelFine, it also trawls the web searching blogs, this time looking for sentences that include the word feel. It then does some clever stuff to work out gender, age, location and weather to capture that persons feeling and the surrounding data. The interface lets you play, search and categorise with this data. Any articles that have pictures attached are represented by a square.
He then went on to say that he thought the web industry was capable of and some useful ideas on how we could get there. He believes that Flash could be one of the next great mediums and if used correctly with ideas strong enough could transcend the web and become something truly special. All in one of the most inspirational talks I have ever seen, amazing.
Martin Lee, Senior Interactive Designer
Leave a Reply