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Day one at FITC was really fun. Unfortunately internet access is not so hot. Apprently the Hilton Toronto considers 5kb/sec high speed internet access. The good news is that the wireless access that the event has is a lot better. There will be a DVD available that will have a good amount of the presentations on it. Worth looking into if you are intersted in seeing some of the presentations more in depth. In any case here is a wrap up of the presentations I saw on day one.

Red5 - Open Source Flash server
John Grden and Chris Allen.
http://osflash.org/red5
http://www.rockonflash.com/blog/
http://www.wiiflash.org/
http://www.papervision3d.org/

This presentation showcased some of the possibilities of Red5. The first example they showed was a live music mixer. It had 8 tracks you could record to live using the Red5 server. The second example also showcased what could be done with wiiFlash. Using 2 wiimotes, John played a virtual drum. The audio part was all handled server side using Red5 and midi with some Java for the sound conversion. Finally they showed another musical example this time combining it with Papervidion3d. John played guitar and the notes where instantly represented on screen on the virtual 3d guitar.

AS 3 and Flash CS3
Colin Moock
http://moock.org/lectures/ActionScriptAndFlashCS3/

Colin basically walked through the new Display List in AS3. A lot of really interesting stuff in this presentation about the new display hierarchy in AS3. I won’t go into too much detail here as his presentation is fairly complete. On a side note, he announced that his book is finished and will be out June 1. This lecture was chapter 29 apparently. Can’t wait to readd the rest of the book.

Deliberate practice : Spiking for Flash properity.
Paul Ortchanian
http://www.reflektions.com

Paul talked about how when he was hired by Goodby, he was going to work with Erik Natzke. The thought of this made him realize he would need to get some practice. So he decide to try and post 3 experiments a week on his blog. This way it forced him to work out some problems, experiments and ideas that could be reused or adapted for different projects. The examples he showed mostly had to do with 3d perspective and how to fake in flash. He had some interesting ideas and his site is definitely worth looking into. I especially liked the bit about steradians. I could have used that on some of my recent projects.

Graffiti 9 to 5
Evan Roth
http://www.ni9e.com
http://blog.ni9e.com
http://del.icio.us/fi5e
http://youtube.com/profile?user=ni9e25
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/

This guy was quite amazing although definitely does not like advertising. He’s the guy ( along with others at the Graffiti Research Lab) who’s responsible for throwies and more recently the laser graffiti. The projects he works on are mostly art driven and counter culture but very interesting. Check out his links for some examples of his work.

Adobe Keynote

Interesting keynote. They showed a bit of the new CS3 interface. The new Photoshop/Illustrator importer looks really cool. It allows you to select the layers/folders you want to include. You can create named symbols right in the import panel and even nested movieclips. You can even set the publish setting for each individual layer. Awesome.

He also showed the new timeline animation to code feature. Not sure yet how well that will integrate to the workflow, guess I’ll find out when I get CS3.

They also talked a bit about Flash Media server. The one interesting thing I found was that It now can stream live video from any computer input source wether it be usb webcam or firewire digital camera.

They also showed some applications built with Apollo. There was a desktop ebay and an Adobe Media Player. These aren’t available yet but we can expect to see more of these if we are to believe the Apollo hype.

Bridging the gap: 2d-3d
Angus Kneale
http://www.the-mill.com/index.php

This was the last presentation of day one. Angus showed off some of the mill’s productions and then went in depth with two of them. King of Crabs for Budweiser and FedEx moon Office. Although I think most people new these spots it was really interesting to see how a tv spot goes from a storyboard to a final production. The use alot of 2d mixed with some 3d. And the compositing techniques they use were very interesting. Some of the crab scenes had 10 layers of compositing just for the shading and lighting of the crab.

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