FITC Amsterdam - day 1

Today was a long but inspiring day. I had the privilege to go to the FITC festival in Amsterdam and watch some of the leading people in the Flash industry talk about their work and their creative processes behind it. Although not all presentations were as I expected, for some this turned out to be a good thing.

The day started off with a talk from the Adobe guys Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow about the Flash platform. They talked about the coverage of the Flash player, version 10 is currently at 55% worldwide and this number is rising fast. Next they went over the devices which are able to run flash applications and concluded that the mobile phone industry covers more than half of the whole market. Adobe is working hard on the Flash Lite player, and also on AIR for mobile devices.

After this intro I went to see Dan Lacivita from Firstborn who talked about integrating live action content with 3D. I was hoping to get an insight of the work flow, maybe showing a project from start to finish. Instead he showed several projects which were all pretty impressive, but the whole "how did he do it?" question kind of remained.

The next two talks were from the Papervision3D guys, Ralph Hauwert and Carlos Ulloa. Both talks were tagged 'technical', but I hoped I could follow along with my ActionScript and basic 3D knowledge. I was wrong. Ralph went pretty deep into performance optimization with pixel bender versus Adobe Alchemy, which allows you to run C code in the Flash player. His examples were really cool though and showed the potential of the new Flash player. His final example was really impressive. Paperquake, a Papervision3D library which loads in Quake levels. It's based on the upcoming Papervision X targeted specifically at Flash player 10. It was amazing to see how fast it ran full screen while remaining responsive. Carlos Ulloa, the founder of Papervision3d, went over the process of his new project "Hello, Enjoy". He showed the different techniques he used to create real-time shadows, reflections and physics in 3D.

The last two talks were from digital creatives Florian Schimitt of Hi-ReS! and Josua Davis. Florian showed the highlights of the last 10 years of Hi-Res! Although all of it was pretty amazing, one was really awesome. They were asked to do a project to bridge the gap between 2 seasons of the Lost series. They created a sort of alternate reality game around a part of the Lost series. By making several websites, hiding codes and clues in these sites and even in real life objects, they manufactured chocolate bars with url's printed on them, they send Lost fans on a hunt for 'the truth'.

The best was saved for last. Joshua Davis gave us a peak in his world of automated creation of art through ActionScript. Not only was his work amazing, the guy was super hyper and extremely funny. The 37 year old pro skateboarder covered in tattoos had the attention of the whole crowd for the entire presentation. He showed how he created several effects using grids, space, and adjusting properties like scale, rotation and transparency. For me this answered some questions I had for a long lime, now all I have to do is figure out how to do it myself.

To finish the day off there was the FITC official party on the Supper Club Cruise Boat. A pretty cool setting for a party. The music was good, the view from the water amazing and the drinks free, what more do you want. Well, maybe one thing, the Flash world needs some more female representation.