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
Flash on the Beach - Day 2
Flash on the Beach, Brighton, England.
Day 2 - Tuesday 30th September 2008.
Martin’s got a rather sporty car, but even with that we had only just made it to Brighton before 9 due to the world famous London traffic. Arriving just in time to catch the first session withAral Balkan. It was a humorous and inspirational talk from a creative who has made all the mistakes and enjoys making a conscious effort everyday to keep making new ones. He was encouraging us digital creatives to be experimental, don’t be afraid to explore new things, should forget the word ‘mistake’ and most important of all: try to have a bit of fun. Quite keen presenter and a rather inspiring session.
Next up was a pure technical session by Niqui Merret about how to make our Flash projects accessible, in other words - reach the widest possible audience. We do know a few things about making HTML files accessible, but it was the first time we were presented with the proper Flash approach and beyond. Hopefully from now on we will be able to implement these into our upcoming Flash projects…
The next presentation has had the first wow factor of the day. It was a session by Carla Diana a US mechanical engineer-coder-designer, sharing her experience on user interaction with physical interfaces, emotionally expressive robots, sounds, everyday objects and of course Flash.
It’s really worth checking out her work , especially worth dedicating a few minutes to repercussion.org. Her presentation really got me thinking about using ‘next generation’ user interactions (for example motion detecting) for our future projects which really raise the bar and take the user experience to a whole new level.
We had our lunch in a nearby Italian restaurant as the weather was so bad we couldn’t go anywhere near the beach. Surprisingly we made the best value for money deal - £3 for a massive Prosciutto pizza or Spaghetti Bolognese.
Bargain. And it even tasted good…
Headed back to the first afternoon presentation called Jam Session. 6 well-known guys of the Flash community had 10 minutes each to show their best work, talk about future Flash features, show their hardcore coding skills or music making abilities. It was highly entertaining.
Next up was Tom Baker, a talented character animator from London sharing his experience in the cartoon industry. He was also giving useful tips on character animation as well as showing tons of cool clips from cartoons he’s been involved with and explaining in detail how they were done.
It was really interesting to see that Flash is now an industry standard tool used by all the big players out there such as Cartoon Network. I feel like i’ve learnt something - cool new tips on character animation as well as what an important role and responsibility it is to make these characters looking as close to real as possible.
The final session of the day was by Bradley Grosh aka GMUNK, a well known, super talented motion graphic designer from the States. He showed loads of behind the scenes dirt so we could all learn something along the way. Anyone who’s interested in motion graphic was watching with their jaws dropped. I’d been waiting for this session the most and he didn’t leave me disappointed. This guy was truly inspiring making me want to go back and experimenting more with 3D, especially with real life physics in the 3D environment (collision detections, particles etc.).
I couldn’t stay for the late evening session so i guess there’s more to follow from Martin tomorrow….
Gabor Eszenyi, Interactive Designer.
Flash on the Beach, Brighton - Day 1
Flash on the Beach, Brighton, England.
Day 1 - Monday 29th September 2008.
Flash on the Beach is the premier Flash conference in Europe. Nearly
50 of the world’s most talented designers, developers, creatives, film
makers and artists presenting on 3 tracks over 3 full days. Flash on
the Beach has brought together the most creative, technical,
entertaining, inspirational, awe-inspiring and educational speakers in
the rich media industry. The Flash bit of the title is more of a
mentality than just a software product.
Early start today, although needn’t have been too concerned, as
registration was quite quick, and the first session started about 20
minutes late. The skies started to clear up just as we (myself and my
colleague Hiro) went our seperate ways into the halls, Consequently
the attendees and our presenter, Marco Casario of comtaste.com, had to cut
short his demonstration on what is, and how to create,
a Mash-up widget with Adobe Air. Essentially, this widget is a desktop
application for aggregating data from public sources / APIs, such as
flickr and Yahoo! maps. Various code libraries and resources for
creating this can be found here .
Next up was Dr. Woohoo (Drew Trujillo to his mum) and his
In The Mod tool for Colour Analytics, ‘a site which
analyses and finds colour relationships in bitmap images, and allows their export to Creative Suite apps’. This was shown as it was developed into various personal and commercial projects. Again, quite a technical session, but a good balance of theory and practice.
Then it was time for a spot of lunch. Fish and chips in sight (just)
of the sea, before heading back for the afternoon sessions.
Next up was an informative session by Geoff Stearns, Flash Engineer at YouTube and the author of SWFObject, now the de-facto standard for embedding Flash content. An overview of the issues related to developing SWFObject and YouTube, current and future developments (such as captioning, a customisable or ‘chromeless’ player for other peoples’ sites, and annotations) as well a few funny clips (natch):
- Deathmetal Dog
- A man getting inside a balloon (yes, really)
- and the Mario theme played with a remote control car and bottles.
More about Geoff and his work can be found here.
The second afternoon session, by photographer Chris Orwig, was far less technical, and barely mentioned Flash. Despite trying to resist the Californian sensibility he seems to embody, I found myself quite inspired by his words and work, showing ‘out-takes’ and re-touching, but also using quotes from both writers and photographers to clearly get his point across. You can find out more at chrisorwig.com (which includes some assignments for willing attendees) - but the two best pieces of advice were to rely on your ideas - not expensive equipment - to get a good shot and never to tell a subject to smile.
The final formal session of the day was by Erik Natzke. Erik talked us through the processes he has developed for creating his artwork. A lot of coding and learning to produce what look like abstract expressionist painting and is generated by Flash. Again, a good balance of tech and inspirational show & tell.
Erik finished at 5, which gave us a bit of time for a beer on the pier and a bite to eat before heading
back to the Dome for the evening’s Inspiration session (accompanied by a free drink). This was given by James Paterson, who learnt Flash to bring his madcap characters and sketchbook musings to life, and now works with other programmers, as well as musicians and dancers, to take his interactive illustrations to a wide audience. The extended trawl through his personal and commercial work was amusing, entertaining and enlightening. So much to see, so I suggest checking it out for yourself at presstube.com.
And if you’d like to see some photos from our adventures, you can, here.
Richard Gallon, Senior Interactive Designer