Aral Balkan spent some time chatting on-camera with Kevin Lynch yesterday and posted the results earlier this morning. It’s an excellent, lengthy conversation, enhanced with URLs and illustrations of the subjects being discussed, and you should definitely check it out.
Well done Aral, and thanks again to both you and Kevin for joining us at Flashforward!
In this podcast I interview Lisa Larson, who will be presenting “Fun with Flash Media Server” at Flashforward2007 Boston. Lisa and Christoph discuss her session, her new book, Flash Video for Professionals, and her other recent work.
This interview was conducted several weeks ago, and Lisa noted that her comment near the beginning, “there’s no new codec, but…” is no longer true; now, there is a new codec!
If you subscribe to our Podcast in iTunes, this latest episode will download automatically. If you’d prefer to listen to it online or download it manually, visit our Podcast archive.
In this podcast I interview Dave Schroeder, who will present “Designing with Sound” at Flashforward2007 Boston. Dave and Christoph discuss his session, his latest work in music and installations, and other recent projects.
If he had recorded the conversation it would no doubt sound much better, but it’s still worth a listen!
If you subscribe to our Podcast in iTunes, this latest episode will download automatically. If you’d prefer to listen to it online or download it manually, visit our Podcast archive.
In this podcast I interview Marc Leuchner and Matt Wright, who will present Designers vs. Developers: How To Avoid Fights on the Playground at Flashforward2007 Boston. They discuss their careers on both sides of the designer/developer divide, how this issue has evolved along with the Flash platform, and recent projects. (This was a fun conversation and I’m personally looking forward to their session very much!)
Note that this interview was conducted earlier this summer and references work that Marc was doing at Schematic; his career has since taken him to Almighty.
If you subscribe to our Podcast in iTunes, this latest episode will download automatically. If you’d prefer to listen to it online or download it manually, visit our Podcast archive.
More interviews will be published later today, so stay tuned!
[Christoph: We have a new home page banner showcasing the speakers and topics that comprise Flashforward2007 Boston! It was created by our friends at Plug-in Media, who also took the time to write up a few words about the design and development process behind this piece. Seb is planning to go into more detail about the technical challenges in his own blog, and we’ll link to those posts as soon as he does. Take it away, Dom & Seb! And thank you again!]
Aha! The Flashforward Banner! What an honour, what a challenge, what a fantastic opportunity to be utterly ridiculous in front of all of our peers.
There’s such a great tradition of stunningly tasteful and beautiful work done on previous banners (the esteemed Magnetic North, Presstube etc.) that we absolutely couldn’t pass by the chance to, in our own special way, pervert the entire institution and do something entirely irreverent.
“Why do this?†you may cry, “We preferred the beauty!!!†Well, I loved the beauty too but beauty for me is always made all the more beautiful by the ability to laugh at itself. I think this might have been why Lynda asked us to do the banner. At least I hope it was. If not, then “Oops.â€
So, what’s funny about Flashforward? Well, Lynda had liked the 1950s B-Movie style of our website so that set the tone for the banner’s humour. Concept-wise, the rest was easy. What would Flashforward be if it formed the basis of a 1950s B-Movie? Would it be a conference for sharing digital ideas and techniques within the global Flash community? Or would in fact be the DIABOLICAL SCHEME OF CREATURES FROM ANOTHER WORLD TO ENSLAVE MANKIND WITH THEIR DEADLY COMPUTER WAVES FROM BEYOND THE STARS THAT BLAST THE FLESH OFF HUMANS!?!?*%
Bingo.
Sensibly, we thought this would be best achieved with some form of mezmeric mind vortex, through which the names of the new High Zombie Planetary Overlords (speakers) could appear and brand their identities in blood straight onto the brains of humanity. Luckily Seb had his new AS3 3D system which, after a bit of tinkering with, would do the job well. All that remained then was to populate it with a few nightmarish visions of the horrors about to befall mankind and, Bob’s your uncle, we were there.
When coming up with concepts and illustrations, I concentrate first on narrative. What you’ve just read is the outline for some crazy yet detailed plot about aliens taking over humanity with a mind ray during a bogus digital event. The banner’s purpose is, of course, to advertise speaker names, not to tell our story, yet because the story’s there we had oceans of ideas for stuff to put in. I find it to be a really fun way to work that often yields the best results, things mostly being funnier if there’s a connection between them, regardless of whether or not you understand what that connection is.
At the end of the day there’s no hard and fast rules when it comes to funny ideas. You can be sure that no matter how much you’re laughing at something, there’ll always be someone who doesn’t think it’s in any way amusing. However, if you don’t think it’s funny then the chances are that no-body else will either (unless of course you’ve just slipped over on a banana skin and landed in a puddle made of custard pie). Cruellest of all, by the time you’ve examined what exactly it is that makes something funny, you’ve inevitably stopped laughing.
It’s best therefore to aim to please yourself (I laugh at my own jokes). See you in Boston (I am annoying company).
We had quite a tall order to follow in the footsteps of such Flash luminaries, so we had to make sure that not only did the banner have a great concept and amazing artwork, but it also had to boldly stretch Flash in areas that it had never been stretched before. The original idea was that the background should have the same effect as mezmerising rotating spirals, but obviously that would have been too easy. And, as the Plug-in Media motto goes, “it’d be boring if it were too easy”.
I thought that the perfect modernised version of the spinny spirals would be an endless vortex stretching away infinitely ahead of you. Think Stargate, Bill and Ted and Doctor Who (do you get Doctor Who over there?).
[Christoph: Yes we do, and I’m still upset about Rose.]
Naturally this represented quite a challenge in Flash, even in AS3. We’ve been working on the Plug-in Media 3D system for some years now, and we’ve now ported most of it into AS3. But this is the first time we’ve used the AS3 version for a commercial project.
The vortex is made up of a series of rings of 3D points, naturally they can’t actually go on for ever, so when the camera goes a little way down it, we shift each ring of points along, and change the colour of it, so it looks like we’re seamlessly travelling through it. This is quite hard to describe, so there’ll be a proper step by step explanation on the blog. Thankfully the system has a “fog” system which, in this case is black to stop you seeing all the way to the end of the vortex.
The 3D arrows are built in code, and rendered with a simple shader using the Plug-in Media 3D engine. The speaker panels are drawn into a Sprite and then converted into a bitmap that’s mapped onto the 3D plane that flies towards the camera. The blood is applied using a very simple custom built particle system (see my Flashforward presentation for more of an explanation of particles!)
It was really fiddly to get the arrows and the speaker panels to travel through the middle of the vortex, and not jump every time the vortex shifted, but that’s another story.
And then finally we added a system that checks the framerate and alters the quality of the movie dependent on that.
[Update: Seb posted his first article about the banner, including a cool wireframe view!]
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