Wired World

Geoff Lillemon and Anita Fontaine - Stop and Smell the Internet

Geoff Lillemon is a Netherlands based surrealist working in the net art movement and with long time collaborator Anita Fontaine, they are currently producing art projects and commercial exhales with award winning advertising agency Modernista! in Amsterdam. They talked about past/present work and we got to see Geoff reading a poem of his own…although their art may not be my cup of tea, I did enjoy their presentation. But if you ask me one more time, I wish I had chosen Seb’s session. Yep..Papervision seems to be more attractive at the time.

Doug McCune - Steal this code: Decompiling SWFs for fun and profit

The title says it all. Doug talked about tools, which are available to buy ( Sothink SWF Decompiler, Nemo 440, swfdump, abcdump.as, ActionScriptViewer) that allow the user to decompile a swf file. Of course it is not as easy as it sounds, as you do not get most local variable names, method parameter names and for loops turn into while loops. An interesting session, where he also talked about obfuscation, the process of making your source code intentionally horrible to read.

You can download the slides from his presentation here.

Carlo Blatz - How to be a webinnovator - Experience matters?

Carlo is the author of the first professional German book about Flash, and is known as one of the most dedicated Flash pioneers of the German Flash scene. In his session he talked about Innovation, while analysing the formula Innovation = Creativity * Risk Taking. He mentioned past work and present projects and he also talked about the Disney Method, which I had no previous knowledge. It is a quite inspiring and interesting brainstorming method, and I would strongly advise anyone to read this article.  If you know German you could also read the Wikipedia article.

Mario Klingemann - Here be Pixels

Mario was a great speaker in FOTB 07 and I was not going to miss his session. Still I was getting a bit overloaded with information from the last two days, and manipulating pixels was not helping my case. But I gotta say it was an amazing session with an even more impressive speaker.

Jonathan Harris - The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure

Hmmm…I don’t remember any other session causing me such a headache before as this one did…Don’t misunderstand me though..Jonathan is an excellent speaker and his tools are really great. WordCount, 10×10 are only few of the projects he developed, and they are very inspiring. I also enjoyed the first half of his presentation…I found that “We feel fine” could be described as a great concept and the way it is presented quite unique.

As a friend of mine said “The tools were great but the work distinctly underwhelming”.

And I am not that convinced about the mind/heart part yet…Oh and yes..there are a few masterpieces online…don’t you think?!

No comments…Enjoy!

(Music By Goldfrapp, Lovely Head)

Day 2 started with a bit of headache, as last night, after James Patterson’s presentation, we all went to Audio club for drinks (hey there were only £1, thanks to John Davey!). That meant going back home around 2:30 am and missing the 9:oo presentation. No regrets though, as the morning schedule was quite technical for a designer.

After a strong coffee and recharging, here it goes :

Jeremy Thorp - Emergence

Jeremy’s session was definitely the right choice for me. He talked about emergence and it’s requirements, explaining further, the need for mobility, dynamic environments and the ability to distinguish between groups and individuals. He presented his work, including Variance and Plumage. I immediately fell in love with Plumage. It lets users enter a word into a search engine, which is linked to Flickr and as a result it grabs any image tagged with that word. Then it collects it’s colour information and the output is portrayed in feathers. The result is just amazing.

Carla Diana - Robots! The Interface Designer’s Holy Grail

What Carla did in her presentation, was making us jealous of her work. And that is designing a robot, the brainchild of Andrea Thomaz, working along with a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She talked about the process of designing S.A.M. , an emotionally expressive robot (complete with eyeballs, lips and moving ear/antenna pods) for which she is the lead industrial designer. Movement, human interaction, abstraction, emotion, animation were the basic issues she had to think about when designing the robot. Unfortunately I did not manage to take any photos on her session, as I was thinking “I just love her job!”.

Carla also talked about past work and her background. My favourite project has to be Repercussion, a collection of digital instruments.

Jam Session 

This session was a great surprise to everyone. Joa Erbert, Andre Michelle, Carlos Ulloa, Ralph Hauwert, Keith Peters and Mario Klingeman, each one having only 10 minutes to present their experiments. As you can imagine, the room was full and I’m guessing one of the best sessions ever. Personal highlight was Joa Ebert. Joa started typing code for 10 minutes non-stop, and it was crazy!…I have never seen anyone typing code so fast before!

Tom Baker - Life in Cartoons (as seen on TV)

Being a flash animator this presentation was a great opportunity for me to see how Tom Baker works and experiments with animation.  He talked about his background and his way up to where he is standing now, as a flash animator for the BAFTA-nominated Cartoon Network series Skatoony. An interesting session and I certainly enjoyed watching clips from the animated trailer for the PS3 game Heavenly Sword, his latest animation work.

GMUNK Bradley Grosh - GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9

Bradley Grosh is the Creative Head behind GMUNK, a one-man production house. His session involved presenting past and present projects, including motion graphics and strong visuals.  A talented speaker and with a great sense of humour.

Robert Hodgin - The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life.

The Best 1 hour of my time at FOTB 08. Mind blowing visuals, impressive particle effects, incredible emotions! And it’s all made up by Processing.

If you never heard of Robert before, I would suggest visiting his blog as well as his Vimeo page.

Definitely the best way to end Day 2!

Carlos Ulloa - The best way to predict the future is to invent it

FOTB is back and this year I started my journey with Carlos Ulloa, the creator and Project Lead of Papervision3D. Carlos presented us a new racing prototype, based on the one in his website. He talked on the importance of research in any project and how, he and his team, came up with a productive research model. He also discussed the realistic vs playable factor when designing the updated 3d model for his new work.

Dr Woohoo - Transforming ideas to pixels to atoms

I found out about Dr Woohoo last year, when I saw his presentation at FOTB 07 and was not going to miss it this year! Talked about creating applications and scripts, which with the help of ExtendScript Toolkit “talked” to e.g. Illustrator or Photoshop. By that, he could intelligently analyze colors, influence brush strokes and control other various elements. The results are purely amazing and since pictures speak louder than words, no need to say more than : Dr Woohoo’s Store!

And I simply cannot forget the Enraptured Cranberry Jellyfish from Tokyo (Music by Radiohead, Nude.)

Andries Odendaal - Exploitable acts of playfulness.

Andries Odendaal talked about his work and past projects, including the popular Whizzball game. Other projects involved Hoffman RS and IK Skeleton.Whizzball Game

Chris Orwig - The Art and Craft of Photographic Impact

No Flash invloved in this session, yet one of the most inspiring ones.

Erik Natzke - Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play

Erik is one of my favourite speakers. His art is beautiful and unique and it’s online for everyone to have a look.

http://jot.eriknatzke.com/

James Patterson - Modulating a Lot

Before going to his presentation I had no idea what was coming. James is an amazing guy with an incredible world in his head. And I was quite glad that he shared his imaginary friends with the audience. By the end of the session I had tears in my eyes from laughter and he really motivated into exploring flash animation and personal sketches even more.

www.presstube.com

The Flash on the Beach competition ended today and all four entries were fantastic!

You can view them all here

And the winner is…(drumroll)…The Cute Monsters!

I always liked monsters (the cute ones though!) and since being a member of FlashBrighton this was a chance to combine these two things!…it might even be good enough to win me a Flash on the Beach ticket…enjoy!

It’s official. The Rock n’ Roll design has sold it’s first 100 products. It also seems to be very popular for rock n’ roll wanabbe babies, as the baby bodysuit is a top seller.

It’s a bit dissapointing thought that most of the customers are based in US and not in UK, as Cafepress is based in US. But not to worry! There are plans of bringing Wired Portfolio Online Store  closer to us, by opening a new store with the help of Spreadshirt. It makes things easier…and cheaper!(no more oversea delivery charges)

An easy-to-follow recipe.

Ingredients:

• A high resolution image with great colours
• Illustrator (any version will do)
• Spend few hours with the pen tool
• A little more time for those finishing touches
• Adding  a pop-art background
• Listening to your boyfriend’s comments and endless corrections (optional)
• Listening to music loud enough to cover the noisy comments (optional)

E voilà!

  Original image used

  Final Design

..are now available! All made up for shiny happy FlashBrighton group.

Please feel free to download them.

PNG and AI versions available.

PNG AI