It should be illegal to get up at 4AM…
Meet Bert, our design guru

Mr. Wim Vanhenden is in the mood!

Arrival at the hotel, we’ve been driving (too) fast, glad to arrive in 1 piece with our sleepy heads

In the Paris subway, heading over to the Centre Pompidou. Meet Mr. Hans Humblet, Mr. Indra ‘t Jolle, Mr. Stefan Verbakel, Mr. Frederic Humblet, Mr. Wim Vanhenden and Mr. Maarten Serneels, the Boulevart Flash Team.

Web Flash Festival Paris, here we are!

Wim and Erik Natzke, look how proud he is

Again Wim (this dude seems popular ), now in front of the Centre Pompidou, with the Flash Gang in the background

And myself, reporting to you live

From Paris with love

In retrospect, I must say that it hasn’t been what I’d expected it to be. Although there were some really nice sessions (like that by Erik Natzke and Carlos Ulloa), the overall level was below-average in my opinion and I don’t think I’ll be attending next year.

From an event taking place in the artistic Centre Pompidou in the heart of Paris, I expect at least to find a nice ambiance, a vibrant atmosphere, enthousiastic creative people gathering to see what everyone else is doing and sharing ideas with each other. Instead I found a badly organized event (it took me 10 minutes to find the location inside the Centre Pompidou where the event was taking place, not even an arrow in the entrance showing where you needed to be), with people just walking in and out the rooms where the sessions were being held, no bar or lounge to socialize or do some networking, no video screens, no music, no nothing to make it more of an event than of a”place were lectures were being held”.

That’s a real shame, and a missed opportunity.
Another thing that bothered me beyond reason is the fact that in every non-French spoken session, there was an interpreter sitting next to the presenter of the session translating every sentence the guy had to say. While the French are generally not the best English-speaking people in the world, it amazed and annoyed me to see that even web professionals (who I expect to be at such an event) are incapable of understanding what’s being said during a 1-hour session. This means that the presenter actually could only talk during a half hour, because the other half hour was being spent on translations. And although most of it was translated correctly, the translator also got it completely wrong some times, pointing out a whole different story to the public as was being told by the presenter (as was the case with Erik’s session a couple of times).

Some other sessions just sucked – pardon my French – and one even went completely down the drain due to a non-functioning demo that lasted over 30 minutes without the presenter realizing her demo didn’t work, until it started throwing one error after another and finally just crashed (the demo showing alleged interaction between a Wiimote and Flash).

That’s the reason why on Sunday, I decided to enjoy a day of Paris instead of going to the second day at the event, thereby missing out on the session on Processing by Douglas Eric Stanley which I would have liked to attend, and the closing event with amazing work from Erik Natzke. Too bad I didn’t see those 2, but it didn’t make much sense to me to go to the Centre Pompidou at 2PM to see the first session for 45 minutes, then have nothing interesting on for 5 hours and finally enjoying an hour of Natzke at 8PM.

Nope, the Web Flash Festival was a 1-time-thing for me. But nevertheless I’m glad I went over there to know what it was like, and I’ve been to Paris once more, which is never a bad thing

Last Saturday I saw Carlos Ulloa at WFF doing a talk on Papervision3D. Carlos is the founder of this amazing project, and it was very interesting to hear him talk about how it all started and where PPV3D is heading in the near future.

Carlos worked for many years at Sony in London as a game developer/designer. It wasn’t untill Spark Europe in Amsterdam in november 2005 where the idea arose that it would be cool to have a good 3D engine for Flash, and Papervision3D was born. The first one to join Carlos to kick off the project was Joost Korngold (better known as renascent), and on December 1st 2006, PPV3D was first published as Open Source on OSFLash under the MIT license.

The team was quickly joined by John Grden and Ralph Hauwert, and in no time hundreds of other people jumped on the bus. PPV3D now has over 2000 bèta testers and it’s still groing.

The objectives for PPV3D were clear from the start: it had to be powerful and easy to use. People – especially people trying out Open Source software – tend to download a software and start to play around with it for a couple of minutes, and if they’re not able to get going with it really quickly they’ll just throw it away and never look at it again. So to make sure this wouldn’t be the case with PPV3D, the developers payed a lot of attention to the fact that people should be able to pick it up and start playing with it quickly.

To make it powerful, the team chose the following approach:

• production driven design
• optimized for high performance
• linear texture mapping
• hierarchy, instances and materials management

To provide ease of use, they remained aware of the fact that both developers and designers were going to be using the software, and provided features that would benefit both of them.
For developers, this is using an AS3-style syntax and making sure there are no maths required to make it work.
For designers, they made it so designers could use their own 3D package, create & modify stuff without having to recompile the SWF, and prototype their scenes easily.

Carlos then went into some of the deeper details of the framework, showing how it was architectured and how you can use it to build some truly amazing stuff. It would take me too far to describe the whole framework here, so I’d suggest you download it yourself and try it out. And you’ve seen it and used it, I guarantee you you’re hooked!

Papervision 3D release 1.0 is being tested for 4 months now, and only has some minor bugs still to be fixed, but the developers want it to be rock-solid when it’ll be released to the world. So for the final 1.0 release you’ll have to hang on to your socks for a little while still.

Carlos, thanks for the inspiring session and keep up the amazing work!

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!

Bonjour, chèrs spectateurs!

Don’t understand what’s written above? If you’ve read my other post on Aral’s session at MultiMania yesterday, you know what to do: use the web and all it’s great software to find the translation.

Currently, the Web Flash Festival is going on at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. We’re here with 11 guys from our company, so the ambience is great! Just watched a video of past contestors and winners in the Flash animation category, and I’m sorry to say, it sucked

I don’t like to bash people, and I do hope this event is going to be better as the day advances, but first impressions are far from great. There’s (almost) no one here (around 40 visitors for the moment I guess), there’s no “schwung”, just not a creative atmosphere, and the quality of the work displayed so far was far below expectation.

This afternoon, Eric Natzke is going to do a session, that almost can’t be bad… let’s hope so!
I’ll keep you posted!

Well, today probably not as bad as any other day, since we’re going to the Web Flash Festival Paris at the Centre Pompidou. I’m expecting to see alot of nice creative work – web, video and audio – and of course to be having loads of fun with my colleagues Wim, Stefan, Jannes, Tom, Frederik and more guys you may not know yet, but should

And Paris, well… wouldn’t you go there even if there was no event at all? This city totally rocks!
Expect some live blogging coverage if I’ve got internet access there.

Bye for now (better start driving to get there in time )

They show us what is all possible with Flex & Apollo today.
The main point of interest in their session is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics hasn’t got a public API, so they wrote a GA ActionScript 3 API and a GA client in Flex running in Apollo, entitled “Google Analytics Reporting Suite“. With this Apollo app they want to bring Google Analytics to the desktop and provide powerful extra features the desktop has to offer.

The big deal about this is:

• 3+ million users will have instant access to GA from the desktop
• It will reduce Google’s bandwith cost
• It’s just too cool

They’ve shown us how to build a widget for the desktop with Flex and Apollo, using their GARS SWC component.
Which was pretty easy! And thus even cooler!
The widget will be available for download on their labs from tomorrow.

Nice work guys!

In design, there’s good design and bad design. Dave tries to teach us what to pay attention to to make sure that when it comes to sound design, yours is good.

There are 5 basic elements of sound design:

• Voice Over
• Sound Effects
• NavSounds
• Ambience
• Music

There are 3 types of sounds in visual storytelling:

• On screen
• Off screen
• Non-Diegetic (outside of the story space) (like a person speaking in between frames in a movie, telling how the characters met, it’s not in relation to anything directly really, but still belongs to the movie)

There are 3 relationships sound can have to visuals:

• Sympathetic (hit a golf ball and hear a hitting sound, sound is in relation to what’s going on)
• Contrasting (violins in C minor with a picture of a person happily walking around (like in a horror movie))
• Emotive (the sound accompanying the image seems to have no direct relation to what you’re seeing, but it creates an ambience that can be accounted for once you get to know more about what you’ve just seen)

Try to maintain the following production order:

1. Music
2. Voice Over
3. Ambience
4. NavSounds
5. Sound Effects

How to work with sound?

When it concerns music:

• Go for mood vs. genre
• Use it to create a singular space
• It can make us focus on specific things
• It can convey abstract things
• It makes us feel

So in sound design, realise yourself that the above is what you can work with, and ask yourself where and how to use what.
He showed us some movie scenes, repeated a couple of times with different music on them. It’s really strange to discover how your mind differently interprets what you’re seeing if it’s fed other sounds to the pictures! Try it out for yourself, get some movie scene, turn off the sound, and play some music to go with it. Then, repeat what you’ve just done, but play some other music. And be surprised by your own brain.

Great session!

• DisplayList API
• DOM3 Event Model
• E4X (ECMAScript for XML)

…and some others I wasn’t fast enough to copy from the screen

E4X must be one of the greatest additions to the language.
The ease of iterating through an XML document is a snap in AS3 in comparison to AS2!

This session was a quick drill-down of what AS3 is and how you’d best use it.
Peter briefly introduced some Design Patterns (Observer, Singleton, MVC, Decorator) and how you apply them in AS3.
For instance he demo’ed the implementation of the Singleton Pattern in AS3, which needs a workaround since AS3 doesn’t allow for private constructors. This clever workaround was conceived by the Big Mr. Grant Skinner.

Not many new things learned here I must say, but for those of you just getting to know your way around OOP and/or AS3, this is a nice and quick how-to to get you started.

Be sure to check out Peter’s blog from time to time, I’m pretty sure he’ll be posting his presentation there one of these days.

Mike Downey is talking about Apollo for Developers.

Apollo is a technology by Adobe that allows you to bring web applications to the desktop.
Web applications, as in HTML-pages, .NET webapps, but also Flex applications, using embedded Flash or not, or just 100% Flash apps that run entirely out of the browser and can access your local file system!

100% cross-platform, no more browser compatibility issues, no more hard work to make your app work on different OS’es.
As long as it can be shown in a browser, you can port it to the desktop in a snap using Apollo.

Currently, Apollo is available as an Aplha 1 release on Adobe Labs.

To render your app Apollo uses the WebKit browser rendering engine, so really that’s all you should check if you’re building your webapp. If it renders nicely in WebKit, you’re free from browser hassle!

A totally cool demo showing what you can do with Apollo is the Apollo Book.
You’re seeing live webpages HTML rendered in Flash, running in Apollo on your desktop.
100% interactive!
Did I hear you say WOW?

So, how do you start building your own Apollo apps?
Check out my other post: http://www.svendens.com/adobe-air/build-compile-as3-flex2-apollo-eclipse/

More on this day as it continues…