FITC Amsterdam - day 2

Day 2 of FITC Amsterdam. Everybody was still a little tired from the party last night including the first speaker André Michelle. André talked about the new sound API in Flash 10. With some code examples he showed how to achieve some cool sound effects on a loaded song or in real-time. After this he showed the new application he has worked on with his company Hobnox, the Hobnox AudioTool. With the AudioTool you can create music in real-time in Flash using digital simulations of all kinds hardware like for example the Roland synths 303, 808 and 909. He showed how easy it is to create a nice techno beat and go nuts with all kinds of effect. When he finished everyone was awake.

Then I went to see Lee Brimelow. I felt very much at home during his presentation 'Flash Platform Polymath'. He talked about the gap between developers and designers, and that in today's industry it is no longer possible to be a web designer without any knowledge of coding, or to be a developer without any interest in the aesthetic side of things. Specializing is good, and specialist are definitely needed. But there is also a high demand for people with a broader set of skills, people who can do everything: video, sound, animation, both the design and the coding. He described them as a "jack of all trades, and an ace of nothing". I'm interested in a lot of things and still have a lot to learn and find out, as Lee said: "sleeping really holds you back."

At noon it was again time for some experimental ActionScript stuff. Mario Klingemann started his presentation with: "what I'm going to show you isn't really useful", which was of course very promising. He went through a series of effects all building on each other, all based on subdivision of triangles. In the end he actually did find a use and applied his effects to some Flickr images with some pretty cool results.

The next presentation came from Frog design's Jared Ficklin. Again a presentation about sound, but this time it was about sound visualization. With some amazing experiments, smoke rings blasting out of a modified garbage can into the audience and a standing sound wave inside a plastic tube, he explained some sound theories. Then he showed how to dissect music into different frequency levels and make several visual representations of them. From a simple equalizer, to some more interesting things like waving grass and lip syncing. He even made a visual representation of a complete Nirvana album.

A new part of the FITC festival and from now on one that will reappear on every edition is "Cool Shit!". A showcase presentation where six presenters show their 'cool shit'. And cool shit it was. Ralph Hauwert of the Papervision3D team showed some kind of amazing liquid bumpmap effect on a 3D sphere. His fellow team member Seb Lee-Delisle showed a new project for kids he was working on with his company Plugin Media. A complete 3D house through which you can wander and play games. Joa Ebert amazed the audience with his coding skills. He put on some mysterious background music, opened a blank editor and started typing at an insane speed. Within 10 minutes he created a beautiful particle cloud waving in a random but not so random way across the screen changing colors along the way. A nice detail was that he brought his own keyboard, a completely black one without any characters on the keys. André Michelle finished the presentation with another nice and hard techno track created with the Hobnox AudioTool.

The finishing presentation came from a replacement presenter as the original presenter was canceled due to unknown reasons. It was Theodore Watson showing his OpenFrameworks, a free, cross platform, openGL based API for doing cool creative stuff in c++. So unfortunately no Flash but still cool results. I knew him from his work with the Graffiti Research Lab, writing laser graffiti projected on complete buildings in Rotterdam. Beside this he showed some more amazing projects using OpenFrameworks.

The day finished with the closing ceremony, thanking all the sponsors and giving away some prizes. There is still the FITC Wrap Party tonight, but I think I'll pass on this one as tomorrow it is back to work as usual. Although this time with a whole lot of new inspiration.