01

FF – Day 1 – In Closing

Did John Say's Video Game Op. for the beginning of the afternoon block. John's done some great game work but I have to be honest this one was making me sleepy. The Wii Remote peaked my interest as I am in the process of working with OSC and Making Things. I found myself drifting off thinking about what kind of development I could do for my shiny new PS3 and the controllers. Are they truly USB? Could I connect them into the mac and use middleware to talk to flash? Interesting things to ponder. Most of his presentation was about statistics and casual game play. The MIT work with including the blind into the world of gaming was great.

Caught Dave Schroeder's Designing With Sound presentation. Having experience as an audio engineer, I thought this would be an interesting presentation and didn't know what to expect. I was hoping he would do more with the code end of it. Examples of x/y/z effects. Maybe some stuff on the 909 sampling project and doing real-time synthesis in flash, but it was straight up sound design. There were a couple key things he brought up that I'd like to share with you. Many of these are things I new before, but didn't really appreciate as formal terminology and practices.

Types of Sounds:

• On screen – What you see is what you hear in front of you
• Off screen – You hear something outside of your viewing area
• Non-diegetic – A voice over explaining something

Sonic Relationship:

• Sympathetic Relationship – Sound equates to what you are seeing
• Contrasting Relationship – Another and often totally different sound replacing what you would expect to hear
• Abstract/Emotive – The sound, usually a score or passage that sort of captions the visuals. Like a Michael Mann montage

Another interesting thing he mentioned is how the pacing or tempo of the audio can change a persons focus on the visuals. People tend to group things together and what you hear will draw you to movement that matches the audio. Very cool stuff. He also made it clear that planning is key, the power of audio to detract from the visuals, and how to strip down your sound work.

Finally the Film Festival. Kudos to Seb Lee-Delisle getting two mentions and to Carlos for getting the 3D category. I have to say there was some amazing work shown. I have to be honest though. I would have picked different winners for some of the categories.

I wanted to meet up at the after party and say hi to Andy Zupko, but I'm beat… I also had to debug something at the office. Lovely.

All in all it was a good day. No light bulbs went off, other then seeing some great work being done by others. I'm hoping tomorrow and Fr are more code intensive. I was inpsired to do a Papervision 3D sound visualizer using the line class Andy did. Something very organic. I think I'll make it my nod to the Flash Forward experience. So on that note… off to work I go… and bed… T.B.C.

01

FF – Day 1 – Adobe Mobile Roundtable Lunch

Had lunch with a number of fellow developers, many familiar names. We all met with Adobe reps regarding Flash Lite and mobile devices. It was largely a marketing research discussion, but good to give input on something I will be getting more into and I feel will be a strong direction for flash. Mario Klingemann (Quasimondo), Joshua Hirsch (Big Spaceship), Alessandro Pace (biskero), and a few other talented and heavy Flash Lite users. Didn't when the phone, but I got a free Friends of Ed Flash Mobile book.. shweeet

The major points seemed to be centered around the penetration of Flash Light on mobile devices. My biggest gripe is that I don't have a phone that supports it, which isn't really Adobe's fault. No flash for the iPhone until Apple gets its act together, but you can expect a strong push from Adobe to revamp their approach to Mobile.

0

FF – Day 1 – Key Note w/Kevin Lynch

Adobe was nice enough to treat us to Colin's book as I said before. Kevin Lynch, Adobe's software tech guy, gave the keynote introductory speech. He went over the 3 software applications that make up the actionscript environment. The first of the 3 being CS3 was mostly about the plugin enhancements code named "moviestar". A very interesting thing he brought up was that Flash player's Virtual Machine which is called "Tamarin" is being merged into the Mozilla open source world. This mean that in a couple years you will find flash running natively in firefox. This also allows access from developers in streamlining the code. Another key thing he mentioned is the increase in Flash adoption as versions are released. Currently Flash 9 has a penetration rate of 90% which is considerable higher then I though. There were some cool demos of Flex's debugging capabilities as wel as a really coo Air application the will might even make Digidesign take notice called DigiMix. More to come.. off to an Adobe Mobile roundtable discussion.

BTW I sorta missed much of the first block, wanted to see the new additions to AS3, but it was packed and I've seen enough sound visualizers. I should have caught the air presentation.

01

FF – Day 1 – 8:28

Well here it is! Flash Forward otherwise known as FnF (Flash Nerd Fest) and I'm ready to get my nerd on. I'm excited to be here as it's nice to take my mind off of day to day flash work and get creative. About to hit the keynote speech and looking forward to the festivities today. I want to slap myself as I forgot my power cord to my laptop charger but I think I can round one up down the street. Posts might be sparce today. Oh look I got Colin Moock's Essential AS3 book for free!