Sven Dens

Just saw Erik’s session at the WFF in Paris. All I can say is WOW! So inspiring, so impressive, it rocked my world!

Must say that I’m glad I didn’t give up on the festival after the dissapointing kick-off this morning!
Erik showed the evolution of his own work, from the time he himself just started out ’till now. He started off by saying that he was originally a pure designer with no programming skills whatsoever. Animations he built in Flash were built using keyframes on the timeline, which led up to enormous FLA files using hundreds of keyframes to create his animations.

He then realized there had to be a better way of doing things, and started looking into ActionScript.

Getting to know his way around more and more in the language, he became a better animator, but he was also constantly searching for “the extra mile”. How could something that looked really good be turned into something even better?
The answer, maybe surprisingly, was math and physics.

Experimenting with gravity, easing, elasticity and other Laws of Nature he evolved into a true Flash Artist.
He showed some examples of where he was given a jellyfish by a client which he had to animate. To make it as realistic as possible, he needed to have an effect of the tentacles moving around in the water, and that meant doing collision detection on lines in Flash. Another VERY impressive demo was where he would take a bitmap in Flash, mouse over the image generating vector data from it using his code, print it out to PostScript (in Flash and import it into Illustrator, where it then could be scaled to any size.

The show ended with a quick preview of the closing session for this event tomorrow morning. Generated images, all from Flash, accompanied by awsome music.

I can’t really explain to you just how great this was, so I recorded a little video which I’ll be posting tonight from my hotel room (hope the video is ok).

UPDATE: Sorry dear readers, but the video recording failed
I’ll need to get myself a better camera. So no video, sorry…

Erik, if you’re reading this, a big THANK YOU for the amazing display and the inspiration you bring to us all!!

By the way, the other cool dude on the picture is my respected colleague Stefan Verbakel, a young design genius. Be sure to check out his blog from time to time too. It’s been a little quiet there lately, but I’ll get him to write again and I can assure you it’s worth the read!