Flash In The Can Toronto 2009 – Days 1 & 2
Sure, this post is a little late to the party, but I wanted to jot down my thoughts on the show anyways.
This was my first time at FITC; last year I only attended the Get a Job Event. I attended all three days (day three’s post will come later), and had a great time. I will do my best to attend next year.
I didn’t know what to expect going in to this, part of me expected it a bit to be more like a trade show with booths, but as Sunil pointed out, “what kind of things would actually be in booths?” Not to worry, as there was always something to do.
Day 1
My first session was Dr. Woohoo’s Glue69: Connecting the Dots Between the Toolkits. He was prototyping some interesting ideas using OpenFrameworks to have SWFs communicate to desktop applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop & Maya. This is a concept I have always been fascinated by – coming up with ways to link two applications together, even if its just by something basic like batch scripts. Experiments in using Webcams as alternate inputs to audio visualization in Maya was demonstrated. As he put it “the possibilities are endless.” The strong selling point was that OpenFrameworks can sit on a cloud machine, and allow someone to use flash to create something on another computer’s version of Photoshop. This session was covered in the fitc blog, here.
Mario Klingemann’s The Tinkerer’s Box was next – a session I was very excited to see. I really enjoyed how he walked through the initial building blocks of what he was using – triangles and circles, and how he went about creating some custom Class representations, and then jumped from basic examples to the end result:
Some crazy illustrations! These were created as Photoshop-style filters, where an underlying image is analized and a new layer is placed on top. It really was successful at inspiring me – his whole talk (and many of technical talks of the weekend) had the attitude of “here’s how I did it, let’s see what you can come up with!”
At the end of the day, Joshua Davis discussed his work and inspirations, as well as some humorous anecdotes about his life over the last few years. Like Klingemann, he gave a very basic technical discussion of how he creates his work, and left me quite inspired. Davis is a big fan of using technology to assist in the generation of artwork. Using flash, he randomly generates “prototypes” of his art, which is exported to other applications such as Illustrator, and completed using normal digital art means. I’m a fan of his work – something about the abstractness captures my imagination.
Day 2
Ralph Hauwert’s Professionally Pushing Pixels was an interesting session to say the least. Half an inspirational talk, half a discussion on the future of Papervision now that Pixel Bender and Alchemy have arrived, Ralph touched on something that felt like the theme of the conference: computer programming as an art form. You read some of the things Ralph discussed in his own blog post.
Strategies for Flash Integration with Drupal was next, a talk I attended due to some work-related subject matter. I never realized how flexible Drupal was. The thing that stood out was the ability to completely turn your website into a web service for use with Flash, and not even have to publish a drupral “front end.” I was impressed enough to even consider experiment with creating my new portfolio layout with a Drupal backend.
Cool Shit!
Koen De Weggheleire, Ralph Hauwert, Mario Klingemann, Balazs Serenyi, and Dr. Woohoo all took the stage to show off some things they were working on. I was really excited for this demonstration, and while there were one or two very unexpected things, I was sort of let down as Kilngermann, Hauwert and Woohoo’s parts were abridged versions of what I had seen in their talks, and I was always planning on seeing Weggheleire’s on Day 3. Still, there was a highlight. Serenyi, in about 10 minutes, created the basis for a pong game via SourceBinder, using the two halves of the audience as the controller (the left side of the audience waving would move the controller left, and the right side would move it right). He even made the “ball” the most recent #FITC Twitter post.
Another great demo was of Klingermann’s “Twitter ball” app, where recent tweets appear on the screen in bubbles (each bubble is one word of the tweet), and each bubble “fight” fights with one another to get in the right order to form the tweet. Older words don’t fight as hard as newer ones, and fade away after awhile.
Grant Skinner gave a talk titled Things Every Actionscript Developer Should Know, a talk he said he wished he had been given 5 or 6 years into his career. While nothing earth shattering for someone who has always been a developer rather than a designer, it was good to see a proponent of “Know the rules, but don’t live by them.” Things such as not being bogged down by strict design patterns illustrated great insight. The slides are available from the above link, check em out.
Finally, Shaun Hamontree of MK12 discussed his team’s work on the Quantum of Solace opening credits sequence in a session titled Dame Judy Dench Could Kick My Mother’s Ass. While there was some funny anecdotes, and was cool to see the creative process they went through (in particular, the pitches they made that were rejected, one of which I liked better than the final product), I was a little disappointed by the presentation: It was never revealed how different elements were created (which tools were used for what, etc). Perhaps that’s just my inquisitive nature – being a programmer, I always want to know how something works – but I would have preferred a little insight. This was also covered in the fitc blog.
All in all, the first two days of FITC were a lot of fun. I would highly recommend it to anyone in the Flash community as a way to be inspired. Theres lots to see and do (with 5 sessions an hour, there’s always something to check out). More on FITC (day 3) should be posted within the week I hope.
Wayne cited an example of a group of sheep eating grass; if one farmer is a douchebag then he can let his sheep destroy the entire field, whereas if everyone does their part for the “common good” then the community lives on.