Grant Skinner — gskinner.com

Grant Skinner is another old friend of Flashforward — he’s been a film festival judge, presented at more conferences than he’s missed, and won the film festival twice in 2003 alone.

Skinner is CEO and chief architect of gskinner.com, a Flash development and consulting company. He works with leading new media agencies and progressive corporate clients to create cutting-edge applications, games and multimedia pieces. Skinner’s expertise in fusing coding with interface design, usability, marketing and business logic has garnered international acclaim and resulted in a number of prestigious industry awards.

He also maintains an exceptional blog, which has become a true focal point for the Flash community, and not just for discussing Skinner’s projects.

Witness, for example, the discussion that ensued when he asked for feedback on an idea he didn’t end up deciding to speak on this year: Top 5 Flash Problems Solved. Not only did this post elicit many excellent suggestions for such a topic, but many of them were subsequently answered by Skinner or other readers. (Note also that many of these issues are being addressed by other Flashforward sessions, so even though he decided to talk about something more exciting, we’ve got you covered.)

What’s more exciting than solving Flash problems? Shooting ravenous (but cute!) little 3D creatures with an overheating gun, that’s what — Puki: The Swarm. And again, watch how Skinner’s announcement of the beta became the de facto review/complaint/bug tracking system for the game, and how he continually improves it in response to this feedback.

The experience of building and improving this game is the subject of Skinner’s presentation, “Dissecting Puki”…

Want to learn how a genre-leading game, viewed by millions, was assembled in a couple of weeks by a single developer in his spare time? This session is a behind-the-scenes tour of the popular 3D Flash game, “Puki: The Swarm”. Skinner details the architecture, code, mathematics and algorithms involved in the game, as well as the conceptual and creative path of the project. Finally he shares a variety of helpful tips and tricks he discovered while developing the game, including strategies for optimization, discouraging cheating, safe-guarding high scores, and thwarting “game pirates”.

Of course, part of the fun of Flashforward is catching the speakers off-stage as well, and if you see Skinner you might ask him how it’s going with GLIC…

Or better still, you can join us in congratulating him on his June marriage!

Flashforward has been fortunate enough to host some phenomenal artistic collaborations in years past, and this time we’re pleased to present Nando Costa and Geoff Lillemon. They’ll be presenting their latest individual projects as well as their work together.

Nando Costa — hungryfordesign

Costa is an old friend of Flashforward — he’s been a presenter, film festival judge, and also won the festival three times. (Not in the same categories he was judging, fortunately.) Here’s a nice long interview with Costa that includes links to and discussion of many of his recent works. His Flashforward bio:

Costa is Creative Director at Modernista!

Since 1999 Nando has used hungryfordesign to display his personal and client work as a graphic artist. He has worked with all main design mediums, ranging from printed to interactive and animated.

Some of the names in his client list are The Anime Network, MTV, VH1, Nike, Diesel, Country Music Television, CNX, Fine Living Network, Simples Magazine, IDN Publishing, Die-Gestalten Verlag, Dolce & Gabbana, Redley and Fataim.

His fonts, paintings and limited edition prints are for sale at Lard & Joy.

That’s what his bio says anyway, but we don’t see any fonts for sale there… he must have run out, but we’re sure he’ll make more soon.

Geoff Lillemon — Modernista

Lillemon’s work is unlike anything we’ve seen in Flash before, and has an aesthetic coherance that seems in no way limited by the technologies he uses. Follow the links and see for yourself. His bio:

Lillemon is a surrealist working in the net art movement. With collaborator Mike Pelletier, he has produced the performance, L’Orchestre De Oculart, which involves conducting Victorian musicians by hand movement in Max MSP. Lillemon has worked for the National Film Board, BNMI and Studio 7, among others. He currently has a solo show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (through June 19.) www.oculart.com

Costa and Lillemon will be co-presenting their latest work, An Oculart-Hungryfordesign Duet…

Geoff Lillemon’s Oculart presents surrealism in the net art movement: shadows cast under magenta umbrellas; harp chords being struck by skull canes swiped across cameras; an orchestra conducted by dismantled Victorian characters along with an enchanted visual tango; L’Orchestre de Oculart, in rehearsal, amongst a hurricane of saxophones and metronomes, under the chattering teeth of the percussionist being dragged into primordial swamp ooze.

Nando Costa, a.k.a. hungryfordesign, has a strong background in motion graphics, but recently he’s (again) shifted mediums and is now working on merging animated video imagery with complex web content. He will present his latest work, both personal and for clients, at the Boston-based agency Modernista! (where Lillemon now works as well) and will focus on the latest project built for the Hummer brand vehicle.

It’s 2 am where we’re writing this blog post, and we have the WRC Rally Cyprus playing on TiVo for background noise; every single commercial break features a different one of Mondernista!’s Hummer ads — and they’re spectacular. We’ll also be eternally grateful for last year’s “Threaten Men in a Whole New Way” episode (yellow H2, blonde woman with no passengers, big city) for introducing us to Nothing is Wrong by FC Kahuna — a song (and album) that’s been floating at the top of the iPod ever since. Thanks guys! See you in New York!

Just thought you’d appreciate a heads-up on all the discounts you’ll miss out on if you don’t register soon for Flashforward 2005 New York…

• Early registration discount. Save $100 if you register by June 3. (Not to mention your alumnus, MUG or education discount…)
• Up to 15% discount on airfare. But the 30-day cutoff is only about a week from now, depending on how many extra days you plan to spend in The City…
• $119 per night to stay at the New Yorker. But only until the block of discounted rooms is gone. (Oh, and if you play with their reservation configurator, you’ll see that this price applies not only to the one adult, queen-size bed scenario, but also to the two adults, king-size bed scenario. We’re just sayin’.)

You know you’re going to come anyway… so why spend extra money just to be indecisive for a few more weeks? Register already…

Not much happening on the blog lately, but it’s worth it — we have been hard at work finalizing our speaker lineup for New York. Here’s the “final” list (a straggler or two may still find their way in, but with this, all the slots are full.)

We think you’ll agree that having this much technical and artistic genius in one place should be illegal.

We’ll be profiling these speakers and their topics here on the blog in the weeks leading up to the conference, so stay tuned!

[Updated May 25]

• Aral Balkan (Ariaware)
• Pete Barr-Watson (Pixelfury.com)
• Veronique Brossier (Developer)
• Christian Cantrell (Macromedia)
• Mike Chambers (Macromedia)
• Nikolai Cornell (Made in LA)
• Jacob Correia (Say Design)
• Nando Costa (hungryfordesign.com)
• Carla Diana (Repercussion)
• Darren David (Fluid)
• Justin Everett-Church (Yahoo!)
• Ze Frank (zefrank.com)
• Chris Georgenes (Mudbubble)
• Branden Hall (The Department of Notation)
• Peter Hall (World Archipelago Internet)
• Dale Herigstad (Schematic)
• Tom Igoe (ITP, Tisch School, NYU)
• Chafic Kazoun (B-Line Express)
• Paula le Dieu (Creative Commons)
• Gicheol Lee (The Music Box Project)
• Geoff Lillemon (oculart.com)
• Kevin Lynch (Macromedia)
• Ken Martin (BLITZ)
• John Mayo-Smith (R/GA)
• Mike Migurski (Stamen Design)
• Jin-Yo Mok (The Music Box Project)
• Garrett Nantz (Big Spaceship)
• Erik Natzke (Natzke Design)
• Michael Ninness (Lynda.com)
• Chris Orwig (Brooks Institute of Photography)
• Josh Ott (Freedom Interactive Design)
• Keith Peters (BIT-101)
• Amit Pitaru (pitaru.com)
• Robert Reinhardt (Schematic | [theMAKERS])
• Matt Richmond (The Chopping Block)
• Jose Rodriguez (JRVisuals)
• Evan Roth (ni9e)
• John Say (Say Design)
• Rich Shupe (FMA)
• Grant Skinner (gskinner.com)
• Geoff Stearns (The Chopping Block)
• Craig Swann (CRASH!MEDIA)
• Jared Tarbell (Levitated.net)
• Glyn Thomas (thomasglyn.com)
• Ivan Todorov (BLITZ)
• Jakob Trollback (Trollback + Company)
• Guy Watson (FlashGuru LTD)
• Marcos Weskamp (B2)
• Ami Wolf (The Music Box Project)