Today’s review is going to be shorter than yesterday’s review and I have two really good reasons for that. 1) I stayed out a bit too late at the Influxis party at wrong bar the night before, and 2) I doubled up on a few sessions when two I wanted to see were running at the same time.
Basically I’m really tired and went to way more sessions than I did yesterday.
The Pixel Whisperer
Mario Klingemann
This session was great. Totally worth dragging yourself out of bed after only 4 hours of sleep. Mario showed some awesome samples of what you can accomplish using the basic bitmap methods and filters in Flash. And it wasn’t just your everyday bitmap manipulation.
He showed a Motion Tracking example based on analyzing the differences between frames of web cam video. Then, built upon that to demo the basis of a multi-touch interface by motion tracking white finger tips of gloves. There was almost dancing involved.
The session finished off with a demo of a.viary.com’s Peacock. Also know as “pixel lego”.
The Madness of Interaction
Gurpo W
These guys started an interactive agency in Mexico when there were no other interactive agencies. They do some amazing work. You can check some of it out on their site. (It’s not in English, btw)
I also liked that they took the time to talk a bit about their process and what they learned for each project. That approach makes seeing great work all that much more interesting.
Creating the Next Generation Happy Meal Toy
Julian Dolce
I wasn’t actually planning on going to this session. Jose convinced me to go at the last minute and I’m really glad I did.
Julian not only showed the really cool interactive happy meal toys that Fuel Industries have been working on, he also went into a lot of detail as to how their team got through such a project.
He went into a lot of detail as to how they made the shift to working on a project with a longer timeline and working in a bigger team. All the internal “behind the scenes” of a larger team info made it one of the best sessions of the day for me.
After all that, there was lunch. Followed by craziness for the first half of the afternoon.
I was torn between sessions so, I sat in on a little Flash 2D and 3D effects before jumping into see James Patterson’s Modulate More. Then ended up checking out New Works to see some of what Joshua Davis is up to these days.
Making Real Music with Flash
Andre Michelle
Andre Michelle is obviously way smarter about all things audio than I am. He started out going into a little bit of detail on how to generate sound out of Flash. Then, showed some sound experiments and finished up with a demo of what you can do with the Hobnox Audio Tool. I especially liked the Flash-based vinyl scratching experiment. Very cool.
North Kingdom – An Inside View
David Eriksson
North Kingdom is a studio located way up in northern Sweden. So North, in fact, they only get a half hour of daylight around Christmas time.
This presentation was mostly about the studio itself and how it worked. There’s actually an amazing amount of high quality work being produced in Northern Sweden. As David pointed out, there’s not much else to do but work in the town they live in.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing because North Kingdom has produced some quality interactive pieces, including the Get the Glass game that got a lot of press last year. Check out their site for samples.
