linkbizkits

Apollo outside the box
Keith Peters
http://www.bit-101.com
The presentation files

With this presentation Keith wanted to challenge the definition of what an apollo application is. He like to think of Apollo as the Flash Player on steroids. Apollo actually outputs a swf file when you compile it. Its not a regular swf file and won’t play in the normal Flash Player. It’s got all kinds of added Apollo capabilities.

As Apollo lets you chrome the window however you want, even making it trasparent, it allows you to do some fun stuff (although maybe not very useful). He showed some example that are quite silly. He had a sheep running on the desktop, an asteroid game that plays over the desktop, putting bullet holes on the desktop, he even found a way to hack a screensaver out. Now obviuosly these examples are not very useful in everyday life, but I think that was the point. To show us that Apollo can be used for fun as well.

One of the major drawbacks to Apollo as I see it is that right now, you have to download Apollo runtime as well as your own Apollo application. So a user actually has to go find the Apollo runtime to be able to use your apps. Not very convenient.

Beyond this however, I can see how Apollo could be a powerful tool to building cross platform applications.

You can’t do everything
Patrick Keenan
Alan smith
http://www.thmvmnt.com
http://prototype.themovement.info/
http://www.theundicided.ca
http://www.joinhive.com

This was a presentation about their work process and the tools they use in project development. They had some interesting ideas about structuring your process to help in project development. I wont go into to much detail here as they covered a ton of information. A lot of which we’ve heard before. For example, the different types of people (the judge, the director, …) and using those types effectively while working. Or the hats method where you get assigned a color hat (black for negative/critical, red for passionate, …) and you have to play that role to force you to think differently. And other methods like asking “what if your business was…” (a car, an animal).

Other stuff they talked about was just planning and how to go about it. They use things like Google calendar and basecamp like tools, but one item I thought was interesting because we started using this recently at work is the Post-it method. Just sticking those post-its up on a board really helps visualize the work that needs to be done.

iam(studio)static
Ron Gervais
http://www.iamstatic.com

I had seen this guy before when he was starting out and its interesting to see the evolution of where he’s going. They started out with their iamstatic site aas a way of showing their animations and personal projects which were mostly flashed based. Out of this grew a broadcast production company which they are today.

He talked about his projects (commercial and personal) and how they helped get them to where they are today. He showed one of their first commercial works done in 2004 and talked about how it was difficult for them as they had no real AE or 3D experience so they ended up doing it mostly in Flash. They’ve refined their 3D and AE skills since then but still get request for that type of work as its in their reel.

He says thats one of the traps of doing commercial work, you get type cast into a certain style of work. For him, this is where personal work comes in. It allows for total creative freedom and helps you break out of this mold. Personal projects also allow for more risk taking which brings a lot of learnings.

He finished by talking about doing the things that come naturally for you. In his case its drawing. He finds this helps him resource and find new creative avenues.

Papervision3D
Carlos Ulloa
http://www.papervision3d.org
http://blog.papervision3d.org/
http://wiki.papervision3d.org/

The idea of Pepervision3D came up when he was at a Spark conference in Amsterdam in November 2005 talking with Joost Korngold (http://www.renascent.nl/) and then on December 1 2006 it they handed it over to open source under an MIT licence. This basically makes it available for free even for commercial use. This was important to them because they wanted it to be used for commercial projects and felt this was the best way to get it out there.

The two main goals they had when developing Papervision3D was for it to be powerful and easy to use. It had to be powerful so that developers would use it in their projects and not just as a toy. They also designed with the flash developer in mind with AS3 style syntax.

However they alos wanted it to be easy enough to use so that the 3d designe or artist could use it without the need of a flash developer. This is part of the reason they used Collada. It allows designers to use their own 3D packages. As Collada is xml based you can open the file and make changes right there. Other things for the designer include being able to create and modify objects without having to recompile and previewing scenes in real time.

Finally they went through the main materials and textures for Papervision3D as well as talking about the future release of Papervision3D.

P.S.: They are having a training session in LA on June 23-24 (hint, hint ).

AS2 to AS3
Stacy Mulcahy
http://www.bitchwhocodes.com
http://www.bitchwhocodes.com/fitc2007
http://del.icio.us/bitchwhocodes/as3

This presentation had a lot of info and she talks fast so my notes are kinda limited. Basically she talked about the changes between AS2 and AS3. She didn’t go into depth about all the features of AS3 but gave a really good overview of the things we use everyday and how they changed. Just a couple of quick examples attachMovie is now addChild, properties no longer have underscores (_x becomes x) and alpha and scale values now range from 0 to 1 instead of 0 to 100.

This presentation was really great for introducing us to the little things that changed that are likely to trip us up as we migrate to AS3.

She will be posting her files on her blog so check them out.

North Kingdom Projects
Robert Lindstrom
Staffan Lamm
http://www.northkingdom.com
http://www.designchapel.com/
http://www.blaugallery.com

It’s always great to see the work from shops like NK. The funny thing is they started their presentation by saying they are a small agency in Sweden. Sure, they’re only 20 employees but look at the work they do and who would dare to qualify them as small.

They showed some of their work, most of which I think we already know. Stuff like Toyota Aygo with the car that comes with a magazine subscription through the door. This one the client liked so much they made it into a tv spot, which ties in nicely with their policy that clients need to rethink the way they do interactive to make it the central part of their campaign, something that’s being said by just about everyone these days I think. The other campaigns they showed were Cow Abduction, On Toyota’s Mind, and Get the Glass among others. For the Get the Glass campaign they showed the making of which was really interesting. The island in the game was actually built. The only CG parts being the characters, water, helicopter and sky. Pretty cool!

Anyway, anyone who doesn’t know NK, get to their site now.

Well there you have it. My three days of FITC. It was great as usual even with the internet connection problems that plagued the whole conference. Definitely makes for some interesting presentations when the whole presentation is based on an internet application.

Some last notes. FITC will have a dvd available with a lot of these presentations. Definitely worth looking into. Also, as I mentioned the web sucked here, so some of the links may not work, either because they haven’t posted the files or I made a mistake in the link. Either way, let me know and I’ll try and update the links. One last thing, I’m sure that CS3 will be installed on my computer when I get back…

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