Some session notes from FITC Amsterdam 2009
As per usual, I didn't get to see many of the sessions at FITC Amsterdam this year. In fact I only saw four of them. Fortunately all four were amazing! Ralph Hauwert pulled off another top notch presentation. His real strength is showing his thought process and reasoning from the beginning of an idea through to it's final execution. In this case it was the build-up to the Flash Player 10 version of Papervision3D. Starting with some basic experiments in Actionscript through to the process of determining where the strengths of Pixel Bender and Alchemy were and how they could be applied to 3D processing. All this culminates in a brand new release of Papervision3D targeted at FP10 that is capable of rendering tens of thousands of polygons or as Ralph showed in another demo, putting half a million particles on screen.
Balazs Serenyi showed us Sourcebinder, a project he and his team at Visual Minds have been working on. I remember the first version of this I saw was extremely interesting, but man have they ever taken it along way since I first invited them to FITC. Sourcebinder is a visual, node based development environment for rapid prototyping of Flash applications. With nodes already written for nearly every major API you can think of, this thing is pretty powerful. The two use cases I see for Sourcebinder are the rapid prototyping of both commercial and art projects, but also for teaching students. Seeing quick results is really important in teaching something new. This is why we all write a "Hello World" app when we start out. You see the results of your code on screen with a high degree of immediacy and that is rewarding and encourages you to do more. Sourcebinder let's you take extremely complex ideas and quickly get a result in real-time while masking the complexity of the various pieces of the project. Even better, the source code of your project is highly organized and is a great starting point to take the idea to production.
Jared Ficklin has been talking about sound in Flash for awhile and it shows. He gave a really well polished and high energy session on using mic activity level and computeSpectrum to visualize sound. What's unique about his approach is his real world sound visualizations that help you understand what's going on. On stage he had a giant vortex cannon made out of a trash bin and a tube full of styrofoam particles, both of which make seeing air movement and sound waves easy. He also showed videos of his fire based visualizers, a Reuben's Tube and a flame table. If you are coming to FITC Toronto, expect to see these things in action at one of the parties or another event just for the fire. It's hard not to love a presentation that has the presenter dancing around on stage.
The session that touched me the most was Keith Peters' on the Art From Code. Not much fancy here, basic black text on white background for slides, occasionally complimented by some of his work, but the content was great. One of the things Keith was really driving home was how important it is to be able to code without obstruction. He's at a point where he simply sits down and his ideas flow out his fingers. He stressed knowing your IDE of choice and your language of choice really well so that they don't hinder you. For experiments he is big on using just the Flash environment since it let's him get results with the most immediacy. This really hit home for me. I work this way with ColdFusion. Not exactly a sexy language like it's flashy cousin Actionscript 3. I can just write code without thinking. My IDE suites my style well and I know 90% of the language without a conscious thought. I want to be this way with Actionscript. I know it fairly well and can do complex things with it, but it doesn't just flow. I have to spend a lot of time looking up API's and sometimes even syntax or structure. It isn't a natural experience for me…yet. I think I want to focus on making this happen this year. I finally have some project ideas I want to take on and I'm hoping this will help me get up to speed so I can code my thoughts directly.
I truly wish I'd been able to catch more sessions, but hopefully I can catch some more in Toronto in April. Should be good. In the meantime, I think I'm going to dig into Sourcebinder and do a presentation on it at FlashinTO this month. I want to show it to some of the teachers and see what they think about it as a learning tool, or even for rapid prototyping of interactive projects.
Comments