Thanks to Brian I was able to attend FITC Toronto 2009.

 

Here are my impressions:

- Awesome, inspiring, informative sessions and lectures

- Panels with all our flash heroes in one place, presenting cool stuff and having fun

- Lovely conference organizer Shawn Pucknell

- Very young audience, large groups of Canadian students, falling asleep in the morning sessions due to heavy partying

- Unfortunately a rather lame awards show and party, very informal winner presentation with lots of interruptions in a club with smoke machines and confetti, host Philip Kerman was hard to hear in different areas of the location. Somebody stated "He is giving those awards away like hotdogs!"

 

These are notes from some of the sessions I attended:

BEAUTIFUL ALGORITHMS: DESIGN FROM NATURE AND CODE

Alec Cove

Alec Cove gave a basic introduction to algorithms based on patterns and shapes in nature. He presented examples that showed how simple systems of rules can generate very complex results.

The simplest ways to generate complex patterns are through repetition, rotation, translation, scaling etc. The arrangements of seeds in sunflowers shows how nature tries to arrange everything in the most efficient way and how efficiency means beauty. More complex examples include cellular automata, Voronoi diagrams (cell-like structures), L-systems (used to simulate plant growth processes), Reaction-diffusion systems (different chemicals diffusing and reacting with one another, producing stable patterns), Chladni patterns (sand forming patterns on a metal plate that vibrates through sound), Harmonographs (geometric images created by a moving pendulum) and Fractals.

He recommended reading "A Visual Introduction to Harmony" by Stephen Wolfram.

His presentation available at: http://www.cove.org/ba_presentation

 

DEVELOPING TOUCH BASED FLASH APPS FOR NOKIA DEVICES

Bill Perry, Robert Burdick of Nokia

Develop Flash apps for Nokia and get funding for it! Nokia is collaborating closely with Adobe to guarantee the best Flash support in the world of mobile phones. They encourage all Flash developers to create touch based applications for their phones through the Open Screen Project, which gives away $10 million of funds and prices altogether. Applications can also be published in the Ovi Store, the developer gets 70% or the revenue. Nokia gives flash access to camera, gps, address book, etc. Swiping works. A lot of the devices already support Flash Lite 3.0. Their online packager works with all operating systems. Unfortunately multi-touch does not work on any their phones yet and we also cannot be sure when AS3.0 will work with Flash Lite.

http://openscreen.forum.nokia.com/

 

ART, GESTURE, COMPUTATION, FRAMEWORK

Zachary Lieberman, Golan Levin of TMEMA

In this awesome session Zachary Lieberman and Golan Levin gave an overview of all the projects they've created since early the 2000s with TMEMA. They showed a photo of little kids staring with open mouth at the installation of their Project Drawn. They call it the open mouth phenomenon - "If you can get someone to open their mouth you found an entry way to their heart."

In their famous project Messa Di Voce voice artist Jaap Blonk created shapes with his voice that would rise up to the top of the screen behind him or that would surround is silhouette like a costume, constantly changing shape according to his sounds. The project Motionscapes explores how technology can be used in classrooms for disabled children. Reface is an installation that remixes the faces of its viewers, the video is edited by blinking. Too many projects to list them all were shown during this session. A really beautiful one was Lights On, a music and light installation on the facade of the Ars Electronica building in Linz.

TMEMA believes in DIWO (Do It With Others) rather than Do It Yourself. To collaborate with others, that is the "joy of open source". An artist is a research in a lab. Through collaboration the works gets better.

Zachary Lieberman and Theo Watson are the creators of openFrameworks, a C++ library for creative coding (for "non-nerds"). They used it to create Reface as well as L.A.S.E.R Tag, a project in which lasers can be used to write huge projected graffiti tags onto buildings.

tmema.org

thesystemis.com

flong.com

openframeworks.cc

 

ADOBE KEYNOTE

Richard Galvan, Justin Everett-Church

Richard Galvan and Justing Everett-Church pointed out some of the not so obvious new features of Flash 10, like the new level of extensibility in flash - custom scripts in java can be written to produce graphics for the deco tool. The new drawing API allows user to quickly create arrays of triangles which can be filled with bitmaps, videos or certain areas of a bitmap or a video, creating a mesh of images. Text fields can now be connected.

 

SPACE

Joshua Davis

Joshua showed how he created some of his latest works which evolved through experiments with bezier curves and objects moving along those curves. By drawing many curves on top of each other with slightly random placement of the bezier control points, then having blurred graphics follow those curves he produced some amazing, very dynamic but soft looking images, refined with numbers and other elements from maps that he loves to integrate into his work.

 

FLASHDUINO!

Brett Forsyth

Brett showed some examples of what can be done with Flash in combination with Arduino, an electronics prototyping platform made up of easy-to-use hardware - the Arduino board -  and the Arduino software. He presented an application which allowed him to rotate an image in space by turning two knobs on his Arduino device as well one that was using the same device to draw on screen. One knob controlled the y-position, the other one the x-position of the end of the invisible pen.

Other applications can be found on his blog: www.thestem.ca

Also check the arduino site: http://www.arduino.cc/

 

MARKETING YOUR SKILLZ (AKA SELF PROMOTION FOR THE SHY CREATIVE TYPE)

Daniel Schutzsmith

Just creating great design or code doesn't mean you get notice by anyone. How do you promote yourself and your work, how can you get the clients that you want to find you?

1) Attract the clients and talent you want

2) Shape your image

3) Create a following of ambassadors

Start by defining your mantra, a short description of what your company is all about. If your secretary doesn't understand what it means it sucks. Some examples of mantras are: Google - "Don't be Evil.", Fedex - "Peace of Mind", Nike - "Authentic Athletic Performance".

Define what your real product is (it is not your skills). A product can even be something like "humor". Example K10K: the product is "attention to detail".

Then target the clients you want to go after. Create a wish list of clients, list the industries you like, define ideal traits. Where should your clients be located? Make a targeted list and then make a plan. Be specific and use dates. Define the objective of the plan. Decide which marketing tools you want to use: press releases, twitter, writing articles, getting to know journalists. Where are your clients and what conferences are they attending? If you want to target architects, go to architecture conferences. They are waiting for somebody to tell them things that are of use to them. They will want to see examples of what you have done and how it relates to them.

Decide how much money you can spend on marketing, per week or per month.

Pay someone to write press releases for you and to write the copy for your website, the money will come back to you. Make t-shirts, stickers etc. Make something tangible that you can leave with your clients. Maintain a blog, show your personality. Build a free web app or give away something else for free that will generate traffic on your website. The ultimate goal is to get people back to your website. Check out HARO (www.helpareporter.com). Make friends with a journalist. Collect your thoughts on whatever the message is. Create press releases for every single project you launch and send it out a few days before or on the day that it is launched. Use facebook, linkedIn etc to create 3rd party routes to you, link social networks on your website. And don't forget email as a marketing tool, put something interesting and meaningful in your signature.

Presentation slides and worksheets can be found here: fitc.graphicdefine.org

twitter: @schutzsmith

 

TWISTED TEXTURES

Justin Everett-Church

Justin Everett-Church explained some of the new features of Flash 10's new drawing API.

The new drawing API is much faster, the user can create lists of vectors and lists of points instead of using the old tedious moveTo()-lineTo()-lineTo() way of drawing. Triangles can be drawn and filled with normal or bitmap fills. By producing a series of triangles a mesh can be created. Each point doesn't only have x and y values but 3 additional values: uv coordinates for mapping bitmap fills and t, a scale factor that adds perspective to any shape or image. Flash 10 also supports new types of gradient fills and the non-zero winding rule, which allows path overlaps to be filled.

Justin showed a nice example where text was animated along a path. This was done by drawing a ribbon out of a mesh of triangles. The text existed as a bitmap fill, which was animated along the path by incrementally changing the uv values.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/features

 

COOL SHIT!

Ralph Hauwert, Mario Klingemann, Balazs Serenyi, Dr. Woohoo, Koen De Weggheleire

These guys showed incredibly sophisticated projects. Balazs Serenyi of VisualMinds presented an application that he created in a very short time with SourceBinder, a node-based visual development environment for Flash 10. The application used twitter feeds to produce cubes with physics and bitmap fills created from the twitter user's' profile photo. The cubes would fall down and the audience could steer a 3D platform to catch each cube through arm movements detected by a webcam. Ralph Hauwert showed a flash version of quake make with Papervision 3DX. Koen De Weggheleire's webcam application distorted and mapped his face onto a circular area while he was singing along with the music input. Mario Klingemann applied a Van Gogh like effect to an image using his flash application Peacock. Dr. Woohoo used openFrameworks to make an swf talk to illustrator, updating the illustrator file by moving and rotating graphics in the swf. With openFrameworks he was also able to manipulate the polygons of a sphere in Maya using music input.

 

THINGS EVERY ACTIONSCRIPT DEVELOPER SHOULD KNOW

Grant Skinner

Grant Skinner stated there were a couple of very important things that he wished somebody had told him about actionscript, that would have helped him made the leap from a scripter to a developer and from a developer to a software architect much faster. These things include basic subjects like coding standards, useful tips around garbage collection, structures for project management and some more advanced things like design patterns.

 

The slides of this presentation can be found here:

gskinner.com/talks/things

 

PLAYER-TO-PLAYER COMMUNICATIONS WITH RTMFP

Brian Lesser     

RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol) is Adobe's new communication protocol that enables flash players to talk directly to one another without having to communicate through the server. One player can for example stream video and sound to another player, or values can be passed from one player to the next, moving clips around on the other players screen. Which means no high server bandwidth costs. The integrated Speex audio codex can handle dropped audio packets, so that the data transfer is not slowed down.

The requirements to create RTMFP applications are flash player 10, flash cs4 and flex 3.2 sdk or flex builder 3.0.2, Stratus (an Adobe hosted rendezvous service) or FMS (Flash Media Server). In order to communicate with another player, the flash player needs to receive his nearID from Stratus or FMS, the other player has to receive the name of the stream and the peerID of the remote flash player. Then they can communicate if the related UDP port is not blocked by a firewall. Brian Lesser mentioned some other bugs that might cause the connection between users to fail. In that case they are still able to connect through FMS or Stratus. RTMFP is a great way to create multiuser games, especially since the latencies are rather low.

The presentation slides are available here:

http://flash-communications.net/technotes/fitc2009/index.html

Another article on RTMFP

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/04/adobes-real-time-media-flow-pr.html

 

ENVIRONMENTAL INTERACTION AND IMMERSIVE MEDIA

Steve Mason

Obscura Digital is a company that creates large-scale projections in domes and on facades, stretching across several huge buildings. They've created projections for the Google dome, a location where Google invites their super VIP guests at the Zeitgeist Event to impress them. Other projects include projections on the entire ceiling of Carnegie Hall and several large facade projections and domes in Dubai. In order to go beyond the restrictions of flash regarding the frame rate, performance and especially image and stage size restrictions, they use Scaleform, a tool that is normally used to insert flash interfaces into console games. That way they can run a frame rate of 60 fps while generating incredibly large content.

 

www.scaleform.com

www.obscuradigital.com

 

AWARD WINNERS

 

3D Flash: 
NVIDIA Speak Visual

Audio in Flash: 
Happy in Greenville

Flash Advertisement: 
Wario Land Shake It!



Flash Animation: White Gold

Flash Game:
James Bond: Quantum of Solace Multiplayer Game

Flash Motion Graphics:
40|30, The Gherkin, 30 St. Mary Axe

Flash Narrative:
Secret Location - Portfolio Site

Flash Self-Promotion:
Thank You Begins With a T

Flash Usability: Michener Interactive Patient Record



Technical Excellence in Flash:
Noteflight

Best Canadian Studio Website: Vacuumsucks

Best Canadian Designer Website: Gregory Marc Tare Washington

Best Canadian Developer Website: Peter Nitsch

Best Canadian Student Website: Yohei Shimomae

People's Choice Award: Bram Timmer