Article by Alwyn.
Published: September 29, 2009 at 14:31
Category: Conference, Flash

Flash on the beach 2009

I started off really good last year with my review of my trip to FOTB 2008. But as usual I kinda got lost in the work and before I knew that review would be so outdated that you could already start counting down to the next FOTB. But not this year! So here it is, the sessions I followed, the places I went to etc. . Forgive me if I forget some details or so, I wasn’t always too awake.
I will try to update the report with some images as soon as I’ve found my usb connector somewhere

Monday:

The keynote…

well I’ll be honest, I missed it. Personally I blame the ‘Volks’ pub for throwing great sunday night parties But more on that later.

I did however google around a bit and found some of the exciting new features:

http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/adobe_flash_cs5_sneaks_from_fotb09/

Things such as better coding in Flash IDE (finally!), Flash Builder/Flash CS5 integration, better deco tool (I was waiting for that…), Text Layout framework integration in CS5 panel (awesome), more will come on Max I assume.

Mike Chambers – advanced desktop development with adobe AIR

First and foremost, we will have new API’s coming to AIR (codename Athena):

FileMonitor. Check if files are update, added or removed.
Local file caching, air will check if a certain file is already cached on the system (like an image). If it is, it will use the local version. If it is not, air will download the file and cache it for further use. You will need to use a new meta tag to enable this on certain assets.
StorageVolume API (disk mount/unmount events), so if you insert a usb key you will be notified.

So, not much is outed here, but I’m pretty sure they have a lot of new announcements about Athena on Max next month.

After the new features list, Mike talks about how to implement data synchronization between clients & server. Which was very interesting but we (multimediacollege) developed an AIR app earlier this year in which we pulled everything out of the local (encrypted) storage and client – server synch, so not much new here but nevertheless interesting point of view.

More on Mike’s session can be found on Marc Hibbens blog: http://blog.marchibbins.com/2009/09/22/the-beach/

Presentation files can be found here: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2009/09/22/fotb-slides-advanced-desktop-development-with-adobe-air/

Rich Shupe – Inverse kinematics in flash cs4

Rich Shupe is the guy from the book learning actionscript 3, a great book on which I base most of the course I teach to people who want to learn actionscript 3. So I was very happy to see him on the line up of fotb 2009.

Rich is a great speaker and although the session was most of the time about the basics of IK in Flash CS4 it was fun to watch. Especially because of the funny (and weirdly drawn) examples, just like in the book

After the basics (how to set up IK and how to animate a character) Rich dived into the AS part of IK. Now as you might know there is not much that exciting about that, except for the fact that Rich taught us some nice tricks on how to work with IK models from the library (load at runtime) or IK models that are not on the first frame (you know like that annoying thing when you have an mc that is not on frame 1 and you can’t access it using the instance name…). So at the end, it was a well documented coverage of the IK tools in Flash CS4 and I got some great ideas for playing around with it.

Files here: http://www.learningflashcs4.com/2009/09/20/inverse-kinematics-in-flash-cs4-fotb09/

Rob Chiu – fear / love

(no town hall meeting)

So from a developers point of view, I really didn’t want to miss the town hall meeting but Rob Chiu is just one of my personal hero’s when it comes to video production. So I settled down in the dome to get a bit more info on how he actually works.

His pre production was documented in depth, with extensive casting, location scouting and storyboarding. No wonder it has taken him 6 months to prepare this video (actual shooting was only 3 days). So after that we got to see the new video (premiere, whoow!), title fear/love. Without color effects though, which will give the movie much more ‘feeling’ once applied. Music from Hecq was also great as always.

Joshua Hirsch – Big spaceship: fun begets quality

Joshua starts off with explaining the big spaceship and how they work in different teams to work on jobs. Not a vertical way of working but horizontal. Everyone on the team is working on it at the same time. Because “everyone is creative”.

After that he explained sort of the projects they are working on but especially the side projects make this firm very interesting. Unfortunately there was something wrong with his presentation so we didn’t see all the video’s. We did however get to see a glimpse after the scenes of their new logo animation and also some work they did for Adobe Max. Cool approach, paper, glue and scissors rule!

Hillman Curtis – Telling stories

You may know Hillman Curtis as the art director of macromedia. However that was not the main subject in his talk. He came to talk about his new company (Hillman Curtis) which is a video production company. Hillmans goes on talking about making ‘portrets’ (capturing emotions/personalities) of people with subtle moving or even still video pictures.

Agency 2012

Ok so this wasn’t organized by FOTB but I did want to cover this.

Agency 2012 is an open panel discussion organised by adobe (with view over the Brighton Marina). There were going to be 6 recognized speakers and 50 invitees to talk about the future of web agencies and the tools for dev/designers. The panel was moderated by Andrew Shorten himself. I’m not going to cover everything here, just what I picked up and then my own personal opinion .

The talk started with some questions on how they (panel) are currently dealing with trends in flash and how they get to play around with it in production for clients.

It soon went to how flash is evolving into this massive tool and that ‘flash designers’ are feeling a bit lost in the new workflow. This went on until the end of the discussion.

Although Andy Polaine, instructor and consultant, had some great points about designer / developer positions, I think Carlos gave the best answer to the question where agencies and all the different titles / position should evolve to.

Now this last topic raised some questions with me about how flash is different than before. You can still do as2 projects, use behaviours, classic motion tweening, etc. you can still use it to make quick prototypes.

I don’t see why ‘flash designers’ should feel different about this tool than before. Personally I come from a more designer background but I have always been taught several other programming languages. I just think AS3 gives you possibilities that are much easier to implement, require less hacking and more performance. I don’t see why you should be afraid to adopt a new language, get out of your seat and read the docs . And if you don’t want to do that, the core of flash is still the same like I remembered it from flash 5, it’s just more. And more tools / functionalities doesn’t mean you have to use it. I have a ton of features I don’t use in photoshop either. Just to give one example

I also don’t think that a designer needs a developer to write all the code for him, it’s like people are put in different cages right now. I understand some designers hate / fear that they can no longer prototype things (this is mostly due to the new complexity of requirements nowadays, think 3D) but if you just visit thefwa.com and tell a developer to make the same thing, or use storyboards, drawings to explain it to him. In the end everyone gets the most out of this collaboration.

There was another point which was really interesting and that is that the companies or groups of people that are building the tools (Adobe, Microsoft or even papervision3D), are now also working on other tools that would make it easier to bridge the so called ‘gap’ between a designer and developer. Just take a look at the competing Catalyst & Blend. Or the 3D explorer plugin for the flash IDE. Or just the simple 2.5 D in flash cs4 / fp 10 (without native depth management… missed a ball there Adobe…)

Nevertheless I state my point that ‘flash designers’ should not be afraid of the new versions of flash. It’s not getting more complex; it’s getting more vast. With more functionalities and new ways to achieve things (because of trending requirements)

Tuesday

Jer Thorp – hacking the newsroom

Jer Thorp is using datasets from NY Times API, Guardian API and twitter to visualize current trends, stats over time and reporting. One great example was a study on how many times the words terrorist or communist are being used in the since 1960.

It started with normal bar charts, lines and pie. But then he showed us some circular bar charts and from that point on reporting can be pretty much seen as art.

One of his coolest examples was a globe spinning that showed the state of twitter users (awake, going to bed, …) based on words in tweets.

For the rest, NY Times has the best api to use according to him, and has the most data available(> 1960, problems with regulations and scanning in pre ’60 era).

He uses json and xml to transfer data and display things in processing, which I really should start learning now .

Paul Burnett – More than bending pixels

Paul starts off with a nice air application that show’s a flash logo being pulled out the side of the screen (using a twist modifier, kinde like the genie effect from osx). ~~The air app which he used, was build with Athena since he had used one of the new Storage mount / unmount event~~ Was a fake application (see http://www.mad.com.au/blog/?p=335) you fooled me allright!

After that we are getting a basic overview of pixelbender and how you create filters (markup, language basics).

The reason PB is so fast, is because it’s running in a separate thread.

After that we get to see some simple filters where he plays with color information, channel offsets, etc.

We get to see how to implement these filters in flash since these can’t be added to the IDE (cs5?…)

Now it’s time to extend pixelbender by using multiple input files. Somehow flash automatically sends underlying images to the pixelbender kernel. Not really sure I like this way of working with shaders but hey it works.

After that it’s time to do something completely different with PB kernels. PB (paul burnett, pixel bender, … coincidence?) shows us some audio samples

And last but not least we get to see a small example of number crunching done by pixel bender.

Source files can be found here: http://www.mad.com.au/blog/?p=579

Contrast – unconventional web applications

Rundown of all the trends of current web applications.
Everything is based on conventions

Craig Swann – choose your own adventure (inspire session)

Craig tells about his journey as a beginning artist to the point where he is right now. He shows us some pictures and video of how audio frequencies create patterns in matter (like sand or metal particles) it’s called Cymatics as I recall.

After that, Craig is going bizarre (but awesomely interesting) by showing us some images on how ‘moods’ have an effect on crystallization of water and rotting of food. At one point he shows water crystals from different capital cities, NY looks bad .

And it goes even further when he shows us a video to proof that all living creatures are somehow connected on a psychological level. The video goes as follows: after adding a substance to a plant (I guess), a researcher (remembering names is not my strongest point) connects some sort of lie detector to the plant. Now if you would insult the plant or kill some living creature near it, the graphs will show some emotional fluctuations.

After this he continues his live story based around some quotes like ‘Warrior vs. worrier’, ‘work is play’ and so forth. Great inspire session!

Wednesday

Seb Lee Delisle – Work / play

Seb talks about all the projects he has been working on that show that projects must remain fun in general. He stresses not to use tweening engines and that it’s sometimes better to write custom code instead of using engines. After that we get some interactive examples of his work at Plug-in Media.

Playing pong with the audience by waving with glow sticks and an ‘Anaglyphic 3D’ demo with 3D glasses.

Seb Lee ended the session by showing one of the (awesome) projects he’s working on right now ‘Big and Small’. A site which intelligently combines 3D and 2D and runs really fast and smooth in the browser.

Jam Throwdown

So basically the jam throwdown is 6 different speakers each get 10 minutes to talk about some of their work or just stuff in general. This was FOTB 09’s line up:

Grant Skinner
- Examples of experimentation with balls. Shows also his latest experiments with 3D balls
Joa Ebert
- Live coding of sound visualization. In under 9’ 40’’ he coded a real time sound visualization in Java (processing?). One spicy detail: Joa’s keyboard doesn’t have any glyphs
Jer Thorp
- Using computer generated patterns and visualization tools such as processing to ‘sculpt’ architectural designs. In this case it was a park which had to take disabled people into account.
Mario Klingeman
- Finished his session on ‘collage’ technique. Showed us how he is using algorithms to recreate an image based on fragments of another one. On one hand to create the smallest possible transfer rate but also to create a cool ‘collage’ effect on images.
Julian Dolce
- Ant tasks to build .swf from .fla files from within eclipse.
André Michelle
- Part of his session Kling / klang but with new examples!
- Adding reverb to and pitching sound files.
- Create real time sound with new sound object (8bit audio emulation w/o loops)
- The last example he showed a really cool example of all those things combined. It’s hard to explain but the visual may give you an idea
  
  Source: http://www.flashmagazine.com

Jared Ficklin – Seeing sound – sound visualization in nature & code

Jared is in my opinion a great speaker, I really enjoyed attending his session.
He started off with this example of how to use microphone input to create simple games. Then he went on explaining the nature of sound and how sound is actually working using several props he brought on stage. Also the freaky Palm commercial was put to a new use .
After that the show totally went Braniac when he explained the influence of sound frequency and amplitude on matter and fire! This was a great way to end the day, interesting ánd entertaining!

After that, it’s time to go home, we had a long trip ahead (2.5 delay due to Eurostar). But what a great FOTB once again! In my opinion it may be a little bit more technical, just to make it more profitable for the firm and explicable towards our manager .

One other thing I need to stress though are the FOTB parties. They are great way to start your evening but not much people find their way to the dance floor. I don’t think many attendees are aware that Brighton has a really active nightlife scene. So if you fancy a dance, just visit one of the many bars by the sea side. I prefer ‘Volks’, it’s a small pub with 2 levels on the right side of the pier (towards Audio club) and generally plays the more alternative genres like dubstep, goatrance and drum and bass.

And to call it a day, here are some other links to presentations (I did not attend).

Grant Skinner – quick as a flash: http://gskinner.com/talks/quick/

Joa Ebert – leaving the sandbox: http://www.slideshare.net/guesta9c115e/leaving-the-sandbox

Peter Elst – Secret life of a flash freelancer: http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2009/09/22/the-secret-life-of-a-flash-freelancer/