Flash on the Beach 2010 - FOTB 2010

This is probably the most important flash event (conference) in the UK, it happens in Brighton every year once the summer has gone. This is about people (developers, designers, and some companies) showing what they have done, where is the market going to and also Adobe takes advantage of it for showing new features of Flash and announce new releases of products which is most of the times quite interesting.

For me personally, this is all about learning new things, refresh my ideas, getting inspired and networking (meet people). Some of the speakers are really crazy, you may not believe what people are doing out there till you attend one of their sessions, for example; there was a guy at the end of the afternoon on Monday called Robert Hodgin who has spent some years studying magnetism for creating some audio visualizations, natural simulations and some artistic digital awesome images. It is unbelievable what he has achieved.

FOTB starts always on Sunday and finishes on Wednesday, on each day there are always four sessions happening simultaneously from 9am to 9pm with some short breaks. Sometimes it's a bit tricky to decide which of these sessions you would like to see (most of them are really interesting). I always try to attend those sessions of these speakers who I feel identified with; most of them are flash developers. This year I have attended all of my favorite ones and let me tell you that it was really amazing. I really loved the way how Grant Skinner spoke about the time and how we can manage it to get something extra on the middle of our routine, get inspirited and invest in those things we really would like to do. Andre Michelle has shown some crazy experiments he's doing as part of be working in the audiotool, really cool. Mario Klingemann just answered some of the questions I got about how to apply radial blur filters on images, it was quite interesting the way how he uses pixel bender. Wooooww and what about Joe Albert, this guy is definitely mad, the first time I saw him was in his session one year ago, he came with some crazy ideas about how to decompile a SWF file, analyze it, optimize it and generate a improved version of it, all this done from the byte code structure and this year he came with something just even crazier, he's building his own flash player with crazy features. I felt really comfortable after I heard what Mike Chambers said about optimizing and fighting against performance, he just confirmed for myself that the way how I'm doing things is the correct and proper way of making things in actionscript 3... I was really impressed with the Nando Costa job, I loved his style, very, very unique and I didn't know that he's carioca, carioca means from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil... Another big surprise for me was a French guy called Julien Vallée, he's using crazy unique techniques based on paper and rustic materials for making cool stop-motion videos...

Also there is a cool session on Tuesday morning (the first session of the day) called The Elevator Pitch where some designers, developers have 3 minutes to show their best work. Some of them are really, really good.

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