« FITC pictures | Main | Podcast - Bitchcast Episode 1 »

April 27, 2006

FITC from the Bitch.

I've been meaning to do a nice in depth report of FITC but have failed to do so earlier, as frankly, I'm old and still recovering from four consectutive nights of trashing my liver. I've uploaded more pictures to my FLICKR account.

So here it goes - session by session. Take what I have to say for what its worth.

First off, I got harassed non-stop for mis-pronouncing Chafic's name for which I promptly apologized and made an ass out of myself in doing so to the nice dude. I know him from XBOX, and if its pronounced that way on xbox live, i'm gonna follow suit. However, here we go - I'm an ass. Please forgive me for publically slaughtering his name. :)

Sesssion Overview
Friday
Creating a Visual Language with Brandon Hall
Brandon is always a good speaker. And from this seminar I took away alot about process. I really like Brandon, he's the coolest self-proclaimed geeky guy.

Playing with Yourself.
Grant Skinner is smooth. Despite the technical difficulties in starting the preso, everything else when pretty flawless. He's definitely one of the most enthusiatic speakers and it shows in his presentation style. All my students proclaimed this to be their fave.

Keynote
The Keynote, personally, dissapointed me. It didn't tell us anything we didn't already know. However, Sho is one helluva a presenter and really good for that public type of role. Incredibly nice guy too.

Keep Interested
The things this dude does for a banner ad.... I was really glad I saw Natzke again. He really gave me what i was looking for - inspiration.

Red 5 - Staying on Target
Yes, I didn't go to Josh Davis's preso. I've seen him a couple of times and decided to go check out the Red 5 bit with John and Chris. It was pretty amazing - where they are at and what they are doing in terms of open source Flash Communicationesque type of project with remoting incorporated. They are in version 0.4 from what I can remember, but this could be super cool.

SATURDAY

Beyong Usability
Kristin gave a really good preso. Looking around, it looked like a lot of educational people were in the room, but i think just about anyone could have grabbed something useful from her preso.

Light From Sound
Robert Hodgin gave probably what I would consider my most favorite presentation. The stuff he is doing with Processing was so incredible to see - in terms of the evolution of the idea to execution. Damn man.

Future of Remoting
Kinda of a let down for me when I walked in and the dude was typing out code and mistyping because I think he was nervous. Showing code is good, typing it not so much.

How and What of Geoff McFetridge
Simplicity reigns here. It was cool to see the process and evolution of this guy's work

SUNDAY

AS 3 - How low can we go?
In terms of technical details, this preso takes the cake for me. It was pretty technical and I learned ALOT in this presentation. Darron Schall knows his stuff. Definitely my favorite presentation for learning technical details.

Making a VJ tool
Mario gave a great preso and his sense of humour really engaged the audience. And even tho I can't really see the commercial value for his VJ app- its soooo cool to see someone put in that much time and effort and forethought into an application that really does render wicked results.

Behaviours and AI Simulations
All i can say is this wasn't really for me. Maybe cos the dude beside me was practically sitting on my lap and was a hardcore heavy breather.

And that's the preso's I took in.

Overall impressions -
What's with the lack of tech support in FITC? I think at least 4 presentations suffered from technical issues which could have been quickly resolved if an IT guy was around. Its not fun to see the speakers up there struggling to get the camera or resolution or what not.

Once again, the conference suffered from large attendene, small venue for the social events at night. The Drake hotel was a great example, half the flash community were sitting outside to get into a dinky little basement. Or so i have been told... i was inside taking advantage of the open bar. :)

I came away from the conference with what I came to it for - inspiration. So for me it was a great time and totally worth. I also got to put a lot of faces to names - like Kristin, Brent, Chafic, Darron Schall, Keith Peters, Sam Robbins. I even finally met Mesh and told him i was gonna rock him in Halo- never happened tho. I'll save the brutalization for online play where he can sacrifice his ego;)

Posted by bitch at April 27, 2006 02:12 AM

Comments

Posted by: Brent Bonet at April 27, 2006 03:41 AM

Posted by: Kristin at April 27, 2006 04:50 AM

Posted by: simon at May 18, 2006 09:15 AM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: