Pinche Arnold | if you're not into the whole brevity thing.

I’m sitting in Ike’s Restaurant just outside of my gate in Minneapolis with 3 hours to go until my flight to Phoenix. What better time to reflect on the last week than now, over a cold Stella in St. Paul.

I’ll comment quickly on Minneapolis (MPLS). What I knew from the city before I came was that it had a great music scene. My favorite station in the country “The Current” is broadcast from here, if you know anything about The Current that is all I’ll have to say. If not, they stream, check them out. Cloud Cult, one of my favorite bands is from Minnesota. Oh yeah, and Prince is from here. So first things first, I walked down to the Cedar Cultural Center Sunday night and caught another great band “Grizzly Bear” play. Done, I had experienced a small piece of the MPLS music scene. (The show was sponsored by The Current, sweet.)

Coincidentally I ran into an ex-coworker in the lobby while checking into the Holiday Inn. “Tombo” Bryant takes his Flash very seriously so it was good to see him at the conference; we had a great time at dinner that night catching up.

I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Flagstaff, AZ; MPLS seemed to be a nice blend of each. A wonderful city with a great selection of eateries and nightspots.
I’ll talk about a couple of those later.

The Flashbelt conference is a gathering of media professionals and students with a main focus on Adobe Flash, but certainly not limited to the subject. The best thing I can say about Flashbelt is it seems to inspire creativity and collaboration much more so than other conferences I have attended in the past. The vibe is very relaxed, but the focus on enhancing the user experience in a compelling way is very intense. This may reflect the personality of the man who organizes the conference, Dave Schroeder. Dave has put Flashbelt together for the 6th time this year and all who attended seemed to be very appreciative of his efforts, including the speakers.

The first official day of Flashbelt was Sunday, preceded by a day of workshops. I did not attend a workshop; instead I opted to spend my day enjoying the wifi at Mapps café. I got some much needed work done while watching the rain fall on downtown MPLS. Great kickoff.

The opening session was a keynote by Richard Galvan from Adobe. Some points he touched we’re the changing size, scope and distribution of content. Adobe is currently involved in a project he called the “Open Screen Project” that is to say eventually we will develop media with no consideration for what screen it is played on, from large screen formats to mobile, the media we create will play on any at any time. That being in the near future he did still emphasize the need for a mobile focus. According to Galvan:

”In the next year, 1 billion people will access the internet for the first time ever, via their mobile phone.”

That is no insignificant statistic, especially in my field. If I hadn’t thought of developing for mobile devices before I am thoroughly convinced now. Flash’s mobile player now has the ability to update automatically which is a drastic improvement from the previous version. If you have an idea for a mobile app that must be developed I would suggest you visit: http://www.adobe.com/go/fund ; Nokia and Adobe are offering grants, with little to no strings attached to help mobile development.

Paul Burnett, also from Adobe gave a great talk titled “Getting the Pretty Stuff in”. Paul talked me into using Adobe Bridge, which is something I have ignored in the past. He had some insane tricks to demonstrate from tools already built into Photoshop (CS4) like “Content Aware Scaling” which allows you to exclude certain objects while scaling your image. The “Smart object -> Stack Mode -> Median” was very cool as well; this takes the most common pixels in a series of images, combines them and removes the rest. In his example he automatically removed a passing car from a photo of a building.

The new animation controls in Flash CS4 were probably the most technically impressive aspect of the conference for me. Having still only used CS3 I wasn’t aware of new animation features like the Bone Tool. The Bone Tool is an Inverse Kinematics function that links objects together. He also applied it to a shape where it manipulated it in a fluid, snakelike fashion – there are no limits to what one could do with this new tool. I can’t wait to start all those characters animations I have been too lazy in the past to begin.

NOTE: There is now the ability in Flash CS4 to select and edit multiple files in the menu window. No more adjusting the compression of one BMP or JPG at a time, I can now adjust the compression, and turn smoothing on/off to as many files as a time that I choose.

The cooperation between the titles in the CS4 suite is getting to be quite amazing. I can now design a comp in InDesign, export the design in a file called “XFL” and import into flash. I can create movie clips in Illustrator (F8) and import them seamlessly into Flash. And something I didn’t know: Fireworks is considerably more efficient for compressing JPG files than Photoshop.

Many speakers spoke more to the creative and inspirational side of interactive design than to the technical. Tali Krakowski for instance talked about her love of environmental design. She talked of storytelling, about the relationship between creator and audience.

She suggested the book “On Intelligence”; I plan on checking it out.

More Flash CS4 discoveries:

- Find and Replace function for fonts.
- The shift button adjusts the hot text 10 values, Ctrl adjusts fractional.
- The last icon on the tool panel toggles your 3D animation from global to local
- More to come.

Flash Catalyst is a new beta available now from Flash, it creates applications that use the Flex framework with incredible intuitiveness. A designer can create a working application that can then be brought into Flash Builder where a coder can easily apply the logic. Again, the sky is the limit for mobile applications and the time is right.

Phillip Kerman, “Videos on the Cheap” snuck in some great video production/post production advice in between his video performances.

- Storyboards are fine, but animatics are better.
- Improvisation is very important.
- Shoot ambient noise, you may need it in the editing process.
- Shoot b-roll (common but often forgotten)
- Never say you are going to fix something in post.
- Learn the rules, so you know when to break them.

Geoff Stearns from YouTube also had a talk I enjoyed. We were privy to a behind the scene view of what happens at YouTube. Some lessons learned;

-The Flash YouTube embeds videos with is just now beginning to use AS3
-A YouTube version is in the works that is made to display better on large screens.
-YouTube’s core player team has only 4 full-time flash developers, they must be busy.
- Would you like a chromeless YouTube player? http://www.tinyurl/as3chromeless

Geoff also touched on security, especially what steps we Flash developers and designers should take to create safe websites for ourselves and clients.

Check out: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/cross_domain_policy.html

I cannot talk about Flashbelt 2009 without commenting on Hoss Gifford’s Day 2 keynote presentation “Shared Narrative”. Until now I was completely impressed with the utilization of Twitter throughout the week regarding Flashbelt but the tweets seem to now have one thing in common: love or hate regarding Hoss and his presentation. I have a bit of a neutral opinion on the subject. I am not a close friend of Hoss but have met him at various conferences. He seems to be a fun loving guy, very likeable but intense at times and no one I’d go out of my way to antagonize.

His presentation has become the focal point of Flashbelt 2009 for better or worse. From the response I’m guessing it will be for the better. Hoss has been labeled a sexist, ignorant, a misogynist, chauvinistic, etc. His presentation was certainly over the top in sexual imagery and connotation. I spoke personally to people afterwards who felt offended and uncomfortable and others who loved it. I think generally most in the crowd were unaware of the offense Hoss was committing as it was the most raucous and lively of all the keynotes. Is this wrong? Perhaps it is. I definitely want my field to be all-inclusive and do not wish for any individual or group to feel excluded or disrespected. Dave Schroeder has handled the controversy with spectacular humility. The last I’ve heard on the issue is that he and others in the MPLS area are working to form a formal discussion/panel to address the issues raised (but not created) by Hoss’ presentation. That’s my take on that, having been quoted in the original article on the matter (I’m livenootrac on twitter):

http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/06/minneapolis_fla.php

Here is some links to Hoss’ pdf and videos of the keynote:

http://hossgifford.com/2009/flashbelt/

(Hoss in the paddy wagon after his presentation)

Enough of that.

Jeremy Thorp had one of the most interesting talks of the conference. He is an artist who works with large amounts of data, fed to him by APIs such as the New York Times and Twitter. He then renders this data into the most interesting and beautiful charts, graphs and arrays I have seen. He gathers and exports this data visualization in open source software called Processing.

To end the show we were treated to the work of well-known interactive artist James Paterson, probably best known for his VH1 commercials as well as his website http://www.presstube.com . I had the opportunity to spend the previous night trekking to the local gas station with James to get a plate of the infamous “gas station grilled chicken”. Purchasing grilled chicken from a gas station at 2am is as unhealthy and unsettling as it seems but sitting in the lobby with James sharing stories was well worth the indigestion.

(Paterson art at Pink Hobo Gallery)

After-parties? Yes there were after-parties, with open bars that made for a great opportunity to meet attendees and speakers. The open bars also made the first sessions of the following day a bit hard to sit through, and attend for some, but again, well worth it.

One on One bike shop hosted a great party that featured a bicycle tour of downtown MPLS, catered food, local brew kegs and live music in back alley. The projected videos on the buildings behind the shop were a great touch.

At The Nomad we attendees formed Bocce Ball teams and had a blast playing on their 2 gravel courts. Again an open bar with great taps, pizza and great conversation. On a sad note I left phone at the bar where it was never to be seen, at least by me, again.

(pic taken the next morning, while looking for my phone)

On the final day we took shuttles to the Pink Hobo gallery to see and bid on sketches and data visualization prints. Great time had at the Pink Hobo. Turntables, beer, hipster types, you couldn’t beat it.

Just around the corner was a White Castle Burger, having never been I couldn’t resist.

After Pink Hobo we made the short walk to Nye’s Bar: Polonaise Room. This storied bar was voted best in America in 2006 (2007?), anyways it is a great establishment with tons of personality. Seems to be a must visit in Minneapolis and an apparent Flashbelt staple.

My final thought on Flashbelt 2009 is I will do everything I can NOT to miss it next year. I met some very interesting and talented people and will ride this wave of inspiration for as long as I can. I apologize for all the detail of the sessions in the beginning, hopefully this will be helpful to anyone who wanted to attend but couldn’t.

Thank for reading!

Pinche Arnold