Flash on the Beach

At the last moment, but better later then never I was holding my 3 day company passes to this years Flash event of the year.  Speakers line up was fantastic and so were the seminar topics. I have to say I wasn’t disappointed.

Here are some highlights from the seminars I visited :

AS3 Particle Effects – Now 1000% Extra FREE! by Seb Lee-Delisle
Practical, hands-on seminar about particle effects, very useful indeed. After this seminar I was able to create a fireworks effect for a game I was working on shortly after.

Keith Peters - Make Flash Games. Retire Early.
Although I expected more code oriented approach, this was surprisingly useful from a different point of view. Keith showed us how to make money of the games we make in flash and how even a simple game can be successful when it is based on a good idea.

Papervision3D CS3 Component – get er’ done! by John Grden and Next Generation Websites with Papervision3D by  Carlos Ulloa
were both dedicated to Papervision3D showing some amazing work that has already been done as well as introducing the new features of Pv3D v2.0. John showed us how easy is to create a Star Wars type of game with the component and some new shaders that are included in the new version of Pv3D.

Dynamic Abstraction by Joshua Davis
Fantastic inspirational session by well known digital artist. Completely captivating and inspiring even funny at times, Joshua owned the stage and his work left us breathless.

2D or not 2D that is the question by Mario Klingemann
The hall was packed for this presentation, even the speakers at the conference could barely fit in ! And for me personally, this was one of the top 5 seminars at FOTB07. Very technical and code oriented , Mario was talking most of his presentation about methods of the BitmapData class needed to build flash replica of Photoshop magic wand tool. Fascinating and inspiring choice of methods and approaches.

Robert Hodgins Session
Wow. For me this was visually the most inspiring session of the whole FOTB. Although Robert uses soft called Processing and not Flash, many of his programmatic animation approaches can be translated to flash. We were shown very impressive demos like Magnetosphere and Birds, and it was truly amazing work.

Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Playing from Erik Natzke
was another brilliant session. Very modest and unassuming great man and digital artist.

Flex Application Development – Done in 60 minutes by Mike Jones
another very practical and hands on session. I did videotaped this one, will post on my blog soon.

Jared Tarbell  : Algorithms to Fill Space
I never hear of Jared before, but after you’ve seen his presentation you will immediately put him in the same category or digital geniuses such as Natzke, Hodgins or Davis. Mathematical algorithms can be very beautiful indeed. In front of our eyes amazing canvases were created and filled with beautiful geometry using just a simple set of rules. Amazing stuff.