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FLASH FORWARD AMSTERDAM - 31 OCT - 2 NOV

Overall the conference was great. Three days of all things 'flash' held in the centre of Amsterdam.
The venue was a feature building in Amsterdam, the Beurs van Berlage - originally the amsterdam stockexchange and designed by the well known dutch architect back in the early 1900's.

The first day of the conference was just a selection of technical 'how to' sessions. I attended Sam Wan's presentations on xml in the morning - technical stuff, not too advanced but interesting all the same.
In the afternoon I attended a session from the guy who does the 'devil doll' cartoon's on shockwave (Joe Sparks). I dont really like his cartoons - but they seem hugely popular so he must have an audience - he did have a rather fine quiff so maybe that's the secret of his success.

As I roamed around the conference venue I marvelled at the fact that everyone attending was about my age (29), I had expected a younger crowd. I was surprised that every one else was smoking (tobacco only) - they dont seem to have non-smokers in europe.
I also meandered around the display booths trying to sneeze on adobe's Mac flat screen and actually watched someone buy my book!
I also accidentally went into the womens loo - I didnt see the sign until I was on the way out.

The second day began with a bang, Macromedia's keynote speech where they showed a peek at flash 6, announced a flash plugin for nokia phones and pretty much emphasised that the future of flash was in web applications and in content for mobile devices.
The flash 6 preview was just a glimpse at the development build but showed a few new features.
The look and feel has changed a bit again - now looking more like dreamweaver with property windows etc.
The largely useless concept of smart clips had been dumped and replaced with the far more useable idea of custom components, so you can build your own elements (like a scroll bar) and then drag and drop them off a custom toolbar into your flash file.
There is also a new point transform tool - which should make the drawing environment a whole lot easier to use for changing shapes. No news however on any additions to the programming language.

Following the keynote I attended Joshua Davis's presentation. Joshua said that he no longer works for web agency Kioken in New York which was responsible for the barneys and motown sites, but recently quit to become a freelancer (there seem to be a lot of freelance flashers at the moment). He has essentially turned into a digital artist, making most of his money from speaking at conferences, art galleries and the like. In his presentation he showed the development process for a number of pieces of work. For example one piece began as a randomly moving circle, just a new random position every frame. He adapted it so that the circle stayed mostly on the stage, then added in another randomly moving circle. He then created a abstract shape and scaled the shape to match the x and y distance of the two circles. He changed the shape into a movie clip that faded in, did nothing for a while, faded out and then flashed as a giant white light - a simple birth, life, death theme. Once sound was added the final project ended up looking like lightning flashes viewed through random architecture. - see http://www.praystation.com and click on IE 0400 (2001) on the left side

Next up was Branden Hall and Sam Wan, two of the best known flash coders. I was pleased to find that this was a pretty high level programming presentation. They talked through some work they have done in trying to bring a java style event model to flash - personally I like the idea but think the implementation is a bit difficult. They also discussed a number of issues and solutions around building applications in flash.

One of the key themes that came out of all most all of the presentations I saw was that flash is now being used to build actual applications. Flash intros are gone and forgotten and 'all flash web sites' are pretty much a thing of the past (with the exception of kids sites - which seem to all be in flash). Now the key focus seems to be on building tools, games and applications in flash. Macromedia's keynote showcased three sites and all of them were flash applications and even most of the abstract 'art designers' are building their own applications to help build their flash art pieces.
This suits me pretty well - as my site smallblueprinter.com was built to show people that flash can be used to build applications - and my core focus seems to be developing into just producing games and tools/apps in flash.

The third presentation I saw was an 'international design showcase'. Basically some french, italian and dutch flash designers talking through their work.
The french guys talked about designing web sites for kids. They have been responsible for the french TV's kids site - quite a huge project and through their appalling english I got a bunch of useful ideas should I ever need to do work for a children's site. (eg: providing real-time chat using just graphics/icons rather than text to prevent any one being able to send offensive messages)
Next up was an italian designer who showcase some of his excellent work and explained the motivations behind it.
Lastly there was a dutch designer who encourages flash designers to learn how to optimise their work by trying to build web sites that are only 2K. It's a reasonable idea, if you try to build a flash file that is under 2K and still interesting you will have to focus on finding ways to keep the file small - you can then apply the same techniques to more 'real world' projects.

The following presentation was Andries Odeials of wireframe.co.za fame. His excellent presentation was on isometric 3D in flash. This was especially interesting to me, as the isometric component of smallblueprinter is quite simplistic and Andries covered in detail the maths and process involved in building isometric worlds in flash. He showed an application he uses to build isometric worlds (like a level editor) and a fantastic little isometric game he built for HP - check it out at http://www.hp-expo.com/winabeetle/uk/eng/bugginplay.asp

The next presentation was by the guy behind the site flight404.com. I didnt mean to go to this presentation but somehow ended up in the wrong room, and it turned out to be one of the best presentations of the conference. All he did was showed the process of working from one simple idea and building on it. The steps along the way were all simple but the effect he ended up with was stunning. He started with a simple mouse trail, just a circle that trailed around following the mouse. He adapted this so that the trail started small, got bigger and then small again. The result was it looked like leech following the mouse. He complained that most people respond to mouse trail effects by rapidly moving their mouse around, while he wanted a slower more organic movement, so he adapted the code so the mouse trail (leech object) moved slowly in the direction of the mouse rather than actually trail it around. He modified the trail object and it started to look like objects swimming - which pushed him in the direction of making swimming fish. He drew a view of a fish from a range of angles and put in some extra code so to face the fish based on the direction of the movement - the result was the impression of a tank of little fish swimming around. He then asked himself - what other things can he get in a sliced and viewed from every angle form. We'll there happens to be a human body that was donated to science and subsequently sliced into pieces. He found the raw images from this on the internet and fed them into his flash file - the result was a stunning - a swimming human body - the audience at the presentation bust into instant applause - see flight404.com click through the entry and click on any of the boxes in the top left corner.

The day ended with a networking session - which really means free food and wine and everyone talking to everyone.

The networking session was interrupted by the very cool vector lounge group. This is a bunch of french guys who try to combine music and flash art pieces into live events. They ask designers to produce more experimental work that can work with music.
They started with a flash piece that responds to fed in sounds - so that aN image of a tree grows in response to sounds - they had a live dj scratching and the tree grew in time to the scratching - very cool.
There were a few more works ( I can quite remember all of it) showcased including some brilliant motion kinetics work by andries - see http://www.vectorlounge.com/04_amsterdam/jam/wireframe.html
It hard to explain but the vector lounge bit gave the end of the day a great lift. To have a large room packed full of flash developers from all over the world cheering on live performances of experimental flash work seemed to be what the conference was really about - it was cool and inspirational without being pretentious, or too arty/trendy.

The third day began with a keynote from software giant Abobe who apparently showed off their flash related products. I didnt attend, choosing to sleep in rather than hear adobe peddle their second rate flash clone, although I now kinda wish Id seen it.

The first thing I saw on the third day was german company pep-works taking about flash games development. I thought this would be right up my alley, as they were supposed to be talking about game development including platform games and 3d games but alas it was a very boring presentation - probably the only dull one I saw. They talked mostly about their artwork - showing an endless display of sketches for each piece of artwork and showed an intro movie that took them one whole year to make! They also told the whole story behind their game " this is a cyborg, the cyborgs werent always cyborgs but when the cyborg leader became a cyborg ...etc" - yawn. They showed a beta version of A platform game they have done - it looked alright but had paginated scrolling, so it wasnt anything new. Their 3d game was also only a beta - it was pretty simple - personally Ive seen better (including my own skiing game - - a bit of self promo there ).

Following them was Erik Natzke. Like quite a few of the presenters Erik is best known for his experimental flash work shown at natzke.com. He talked a bit about how he got into flash and about the motivation for a number of his pieces. If you havent seen it, its worth checking out his visual interpretation of a poem at http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/walking/
I wish Id gone and talked to Natzke but I was too shy

The vibe at FF was really positive, people seem to have gotten over the 'downturn' in the industry and are now focussing on doing new creative projects.

After some lunch there was the 'flash actionscripters masters session', which included sam wan, brandan hall, colin mook and some german guy who I cant recall, doing a Q and A on all things codey. They started the session with a brilliant demo bit, each presenter had one minute to show something interesting they had done. By this point in the conference it came as no surprise that they all showed mini-applications built in flash. Brandan showed a flash tool for designing business cards - including the ability to restrict input sections, so employees can fill out their own card but only manages can change the design. Sam showed a tool/toy he built with brandan that is effectively a visual programming language for controlling battle robots in flash. Effectively he's written a mini programming language in flash.
I cant remember right now what colin or the german guy showed - I remember being impressed by it, but I saw a lot of cool stuff - Im sure it will come back to me soon

Next I went off to the session by UK team Kerb on flash for television. Kerb have done a number of TV commercials, one music video in flash and their flash cartoon series was due to start on UK tv during the conference. They gave a lot of good suggestions on how to convert flash to TV - including emphasising over and over that you need a good lawyer when dealing with TV stations. However half way through their presentation their apple mac crashed twice - and so I left to have a look at the other session by James Paterson of Presstube and Amit Pitaru.
They were showing their 'Insert Silence' site - which is based around integrating music and 'sketch book' style animation. Really what these guys do is 'experimental arty' flash, however I was interested in the fact that they use quite a lot of complex programming to achieve their end result. They have built an application for them selves that allows them to control the semi-random movement of their animation elements and to record and edit the resulting animation - they were commission by Bjork to create a web video for a song off her new album and they used this application to synch the animation to the song.
They also had a project that adapted an animation based on audio volume and pitch.
With a baby grand on the stage Amit played some improvised jazz piano and their animation responding (roughly) to the volume and key of his live performance! Quite impressive.

The last presentation of the conference was by Brendan Dawes. Brendan is an obsessive Hitchcok fan and is responsible for the popular psycho-editor (one of the first application/toys built in flash - which lets you re-edit the shower scene from psycho). In his presentation he tried to find links between flash development and hitchcok films, it was an interesting idea, and when he focused on the saul bass titles it kind of made sense but on the whole I think he missed the mark a little bit.

Lastly they gave out a bunch of door prizes - including copies of flash - like anyone at the conference wouldn't already have it!

Overall the conference was a fantastic experience for me - Admittedly Im an obsessive flash developer, so three days of full on flash with the best flash developers in the world talking about their work - is pretty much all I need to keep me happy.
The key thing that really hangs with me following the conference is that the focus of what people are doing with flash seems to have fundamentally changed. Flash has broken out of the 'cool effects for web sites' mode and people are using it to build experimental art pieces, TV cartoons, music videos, games and most importantly applications that run on the web and on mobile devices such pocket pc's and soon mobile phones.

Hope you found this interesting.

Presentation files:

Colin Moock ActionScript and Advanced ActionScript Workshop:
http://www.moock.org/webdesign/lectures

Sam Wan Introduction to XML with Flash and ActionScript Workshop:
http://www.samuelwan.com/flashforward/amsterdam/SamuelWan_XMLWorkshopFiles.zip
http://samuelwan.com/flashforward/amsterdam2001/

Pete Barr-Watson (kerb) Flash for TV and Video:
http://www.pixelfury.com

Andries Odendaal Isometric 3D in Flash
http://www.wireframe.co.za/2001

Robert Hodgin Organic ActionScript: Engineering Life
http://www.flight404.com/source

Erik Natzke Outside the Box: Problem Solving With Flash
http://www.orgonism.com/ffny2001.zip

James Paterson and Amit Pitaru:
Bjork: http://www.showstudio.com/projects/031/031_interactive.html
Insert Silence: http://www.insertsilence.com