Flash On the Beach #1, Monday
Flash on the Beach #1
The next 3 posts are about my trip to the Flash On the Beach conference. As I write these lines, I imagine that I’ll rewrite and edit this post until I get it right, so I’ll probably loose some initial freshness. On the other hand I hope this gives it a bit more perspective. And it will still be very fresh in my mind.
Travelling with me was Yong, a very nice guy and a great flash designer who makes beautiful interfaces and designs.
Not really expecting anything, but excited nonetheless we arrived somewhere around 8 sunday evening, and almost immediately went to the nearest WagaMama to get ourselves stuffed with hot noodles and shrimps.
We found the Queens Hotel very close to the waterfront. The orange lights outlining the famous Pier was looking very familiar, even when visiting Brighton for the first time. Atonement, Chariots of Fire and other great british movies/costume movies all contributed to the feeling of having seen it before. If I were to see the Eiffel tower for the first time again, I’d guess that would be the same feeling – it really feels like you’re walking around a movie set.
Brighton looks like a tourist trap, and even though the date would indicate an end-of-the-season, the streets really looked crowded and as if no tourist was aware of it.
Flashed on the Beach
The Flash on the Beach conference is going on it’s third time. As the arrangers say, it’s getting bigger and bigger. Most notable speakers from the all-encompassing company Adobe. Outstanding people from the community and a lot of professionals are attending. The audience is flash professionals, the actionscript programmers and graphics designers, but I found that some of the topics wouldn’t be lost on Project Managers as well.
We found the dream shop for guys to hang around.
Madonna with the big boobies shop here
Monday started out with getting our passes and getting to meet everybody from the danish community. The intrinsic head count of the Danish flash/actionscripting community mirrors the size of the country quite well, and hailing the people of Konstellation, Zupa, and others, really covered most of the Copenhagen crowd/community.
The Monday program for me turned out to be:
- Keynote
- Mike Chambers
- IK animation
- Town Hall Meeting
- Big Spaceship
- David Hillman Curtis
The Keynote was kicked off with the introduction of The Mariachis, whose rendition of ‘Screenager in Love’ , although it didn’t disband the need for caffeine.
Mike Chambers
A seminar about coding Adobe AIR, and how to get around some stuff that isn’t in the current release. Most solutions has been included in his as3corelib project.
Topics included:
- FileMonitor (AIR doesn’t include functionality to monitor creation/modifying/deletion of files).
- VolumeMonitor (AIR doesn’t allow you to listen directly on system mount/unmount events).
- ResourceCache loader (works just as my own resourcemanager in caching online resources)
Solutions to both topics included polling the files or drives that you are concerned about.
Other various aspects was also discussed:
- Creating code that works with unreliable or unknown network capabilties (queuing uploads/downloads until the application is online)
- Persisting data (for instance for using as an Application Setup-object, saving configuration data).
Somehow it was very nice to get a face on the blogging author, and even though the seminar didn’t have as much meat on it as I’d expected, it was a good experience and omen for the rest of the day.
The slides are available at Mike Chambers’ blog in pdf: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/files/presentations/fotb2009/advanced_desktop_development.pdf
IK Animation
The Inverse Kinematics-animation seminar was aiming to display how to use the IK-tools in CS4. This was a very concrete seminar about how to use the Inverse Kinematic tools found in CS4. The IK tools in CS4 has not been touched, and it was great to get to know what to do with them.
Highlights included scripting movement and animation of the bones, finding out that you’d need to author the bones structure within flash, before getting to script them. and seeing an easy example of how to use audio creativily.
It could be a good idea for me to describe to Art Directors and Designers, exactly what parameters you can use from an audio file, to control animation. One idea is to spectrum-analyse a track, and then find the bass drum freq, the hi-hat freq, and use those frequencies to control certain stuff. As it turned out, this idea was already expanded upon by others, as I found out Wednesday.
Town Hall Meeting
A discussion of big and small within the flash community, with adobe people around the board. A big Q & A about the future of Flash (the S-word did come up), bugs/feature-requests, workflows, and more. It was very pleasing to be part of a nice athmosphere
Josh Hirsh, Big Spaceship
The Minister of Technology at the Big Spaceship, a Digital creative agency. Talking about smokemachines and calling every employee creatives. “You have to let your creatives be unproductive before they’re productive”. One of the slides displayed how the direction of a project was running horizontally, instead of vertically top/down – vertical top/down movement from the strategists down through to the creatives and dsigners and ending with the developer, who is handed something that he not necessarily knows anything about. Horisontal movement indicates that everybody is involved all the time and all get to input creative ideas.
This just reconfirms my suspicion that the environment that you want to work in, is usually found in the relativily new digital agencies, and relativily new advertizing agencies. Old companies are too set in their ways and, having build most of their knowledge and experience around offline marketing, the culture that modern geeks wants, is just not something they are capable of providing. This is not just about the culture, but also the work enviromnent and the workflows. Sometimes it can really pay off to question the old habits and workflows.
David Hillman Curtis
David Hillman Curtis was talking about how he worked his way through the ‘site design’ and found that he’d really rather be working with film. Being inspired by Richard Avadon (spelling/name?), the photographer/, and among others, Edward Hopper he described how he made a career in filming people. A nice filming of David Byrne of Talking Heads with orchestra doing Burning Down The House.
Day well spent
Most adobe people was a bit adamant about revealing too much, as their own conference MAX were only 2 weeks away. Most of Mike Chambers seminar was left obsolete by the fact that the new AIR update to be released, will make almost every shortcuts he was talking about useless.
Brighton is great for housing the seminar, in regards to cafés, restaurants and places to eat. I would guess that attendant numbers is about 500, but there were no feeling of the streets being overcrowded with flash geeks (maybe we’re just better at blending in, than our fellow sys-admin nerds and backend geeks). We had lunch at a french dinér, serving a very british clubsandwich.
The evening was reserved for an Inspirational event and a party at a night club. I opted out and retreated to London where I met with my sister and brother in law, and had a nice greek dinner somewhere around Liverpool Street Station. This also turned out to be for the benefit of these blogpostings, as these very lines was written while sitting on National Railways seats going to/from London
Plans for tomorrow:
- Check out that music instrument store at North Street.
