Big Spaceship

Flash on the Beach provided a wealth of inspiration but possibly one of the best talks for me was the one from Joshua Hirsch of Big Spaceship fame. He is the Minister of Technology (no less) and let me just say I’m ready to convert to his church, or at least hop on a plane and go work in Brooklyn. Ok so his presentation was a bit flaky in that none of the videos worked (curses Snow Leopard – glad I didn’t make the upgrade just yet) but he made up for this with a very enigmatic approach that captivated his audience. He mostly talked about what Big Spaceship is about and their practice and methodology. One of the things I found fascinating was an agency-wide promise to never use stock footage and where possible shoot everything themselves. This ideology manifests itself in their animated logo that they built and shot themselves. From the cardboard cutouts, to the hand built camera track, everything was shot by their in-house team and assembled with a bit of post. He whole-heartedly recommends buying a smoke machine as “you just can’t fake this shit”. Here’s the result of their efforts. Gloriously low-fi and a marvelous stop-motion effort.

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Flash on the Beach opening number

Flash on the Beach opened this year with a musical number. Los Tres Mariachis took to the stage to welcome us to the conference with some rather lovely text based visuals to back them up. This may be a big old geek fest in some people’s eyes but it really is one of the cooler conferences I’ve been to.

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Joa Ebert’s live coding at Flash on the Beach

At the recent Flash on the Beach conference, Joa Ebert took to the stage as part of a line-up of speakers who each had 10 mins to talk. Instead of talking, Joa opted for some fast paced dance music and a spot of live coding. It’s quite hard to make out what is being written on this video but you get the gist. The guy must’ve been practising this for a while – this is some seriously fast code writing.

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Lose/lose

Here’s an interesting idea for a game I heard at Flash on the Beach. The idea is that you download the game and play to your heart’s content. The only catch is that your actions have real life impacts for you. Each alien represents a file on your computer. Every time you destroy an alien that file will be deleted from your machine. If your ship gets destroyed the application itself is deleted. Suffice to say I haven’t actually played the game. But it might be a fun thing to do if you were ever planning on doing a hard reinstall of your operating system or selling your machine on.

lose/lose from zach gage on Vimeo.

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Andre Michelle at FOTB 2009

YouTube – Andre Michelle at FOTB 2009.

Andre Michelle is just too crazy for words. He makes you feel incredibly small and stupid. An absolute legend in the field of flash audio. Check out this little video someone captured from the event.

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Temptation…temptation

I saw this video a while back and it has really stuck with me. Nothing particularly new here ideas-wise but a cute experiment none-the-less. You can really see the thought processes of the kids as they wrangle with the difficult decision of whether or not to eat a marshmallow (the reward for not being a second marshmallow which they can then eat both of). Temptation. Temptation.

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

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New York Times Air App

I saw this product demo for the New York Times whilst at Flash on the Beach and I was really blown away by the app’s interactivity. What a great way to view news content. It has the feel of browsing pages of a newspaper as you are able to scroll sideways and up/down through what looks like broadsheets of a paper. The use of Adobe AIR is perfect in that you are free from the constraints of the browser and you can make the application work like it is a native app to your system. It’s just a shame that the New York Times are struggling so badly at the moment. Let’s hope an app like this will help them learn to monetize their product (perhaps with micro-payments) for their content.

New York Times Reader AIR application from RefreshingApps on Vimeo.

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Flash on the Beach 2009

Lest it all get swallowed up into the Twitter-ether here are my tweets from Flash on the Beach. Lots of links and inspiration to follow over the next week or so.

In reverse order :

1. #fotb Joshua Davis final talk at Flash on the Beach http://twitpic.com/itwqoabout 17 hours ago from Echofon
2. #fotb The legend that is Mario Klingemann. Who needs twitpic anyway?about 20 hours ago from Echofon
3. @jenwell @sebleedelisle is totally legit – he really WILL pay that ticket for you!about 22 hours ago from Echofon
4. #fotb Wonderfully rambling musings on life the, the universe and everything by Craig Swann. Perfect inspiration session.3:26 PM Sep 22nd from Echofon
5. #fotb Mind well and truly blown by Jer Thorpe’s data visualisations6:36 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
6. #fotb lunch at Bill’s6:33 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
7. #fotb packed house for grant skinner’s code optimisation talk gskinner.com/talks3:11 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
8. #fotb ugh no more sales pitches PLEASE2:02 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
9. #fotb elevator pitches. Three minutes each. All novice speakers.1:25 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
10. #fotb latte on the beach http://twitpic.com/iojuo12:49 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
11. #fotb heading to audio in Brighton12:48 PM Sep 21st from Echofon
12. #fotb finding the story in an image with hilman curtis8:46 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
13. #fotb finding the story in the image with hilman curtis8:45 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
14. #fotb definitely agree with Joshua hirsch from big spaceship with their no stock photography or video policy7:37 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
15. #fotb rather fascinating talk on the process of short movie making with Rob Chiu6:16 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
16. #FOTB keynote welcome http://bit.ly/3B8qAi6:16 AM Sep 21st from Tweetbots
17. #fotb really cool sound control demo with inverse kinematics4:28 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
18. #fotb loving The Bine tool and shape armatures in inverse kinematics with Flash CS44:14 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
19. #fotb Carlo Blatz talking about his modified version of SCRUM taking list of requirements vs complexity factor.3:06 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
20. #fotb wow new York times Air app is incredible.1:44 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
21. #FOTB http://twitpic.com/ik7q01:11 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
22. Is it bad to watch Derren Brown on 4OD.?I hope their support line is still open if I get stuck to my chair.10:16 AM Sep 20th from DestroyTwitter
23. Flash on the Beach #FOTB http://bit.ly/2fgqxJ9:05 AM Sep 20th from Tweetbots
24. Agreeing to pick up all 5 conference tickets was a mistake as they come with a laptop bag each #FOTB #fail8:32 AM Sep 20th from Echofon

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#FOTB keynote welcome

Flash on the beach keynote speech kicks off with the three Mariachis singing a comdy welcome, followed by a rather lovely film by Artillery. Next up an Adobe plug with Mark Anders & Richard Galvan.

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Flash on the Beach #FOTB

Just arrived in Brighton and picked up all five of the Lean Mean Fighting Machine Flash on the Beach passes. Bit of a nightmare in that each pass comes with a bag so I’m now crazy bag guy trapsing around the city.

Really looking forward to the conference as it’s the first time I’m able to go for the full three days. I know it’s going to be knackering but there will be loads of cool stuff to see and take in. Going to focus on more of the designer talks this year but will try and make it to all the guru speakers. Mario Klingeman’s talk sounds particularly good this year.

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