Published on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 by Dominic Gelineau

Yeah, well  from my first post you know I’m a developer so usually I choose technical presentations; but not today. What excited me the most were the creative talks, so let’s go on with a recap of those.

Analog Designer in a Digital World by Grzegorz Kozakiewicz

So this talk was kinda weird and had no real structure; you know the speaker hasn’t done this a lot. But all in all, it was still good. Grzegorz explained how he used his difference (being an analog guy in a world dominated by digital) to make something amazing: Pencil Rebel. This talk was really crude and showed the making of this analog world made of cardboard, glue, vegetables and clay. It showed how one man’s vision and 150 pounds can turn out as an amazing thing. Go see it, you won’t waste your time.

Creativity and Chaos by Jason Theodore

By far this was the best presentation of the first two days of FITC. It was all about creativity and how it works and how chaos affects it. I could totally relate to his work, maybe because he was speaking about the Big Bang and Quantum physics. He defines the creative process has being divided in three part. The action phase, the connection phase and the skew phase. From there he explained how chaos helped shape our creativity. Universal chaos bears infinite potential so it shapes the action part because you have to make something out of nothing. External chaos (death, sickness, tornadoes, car accidents) helps us create connections, we relate to other people who suffered the same. Finally, personal chaos gives us a different angle so it helps us skew the ideas to make them our own. This guy (@jted) was really inspiring and I am definitely going to watch his presentation again which he graciously gives away on slideshare.

Tools and Prototypes by Mathieu Badimon

I wanted to see the Ralph Hauwert (@unitzeroone) talk a lot too but I figured that it is not every day that we can see he president of a successful agency like firstborn(@firstborn_nyc) speak. Dan LaCivita just wasn’t there and instead we got two senior Flash Developers instead. The talk was good, they showed how they would develop tools on projects to answer problems they encountered. They showed a tool which makes a writing animation from any font, a tool to test the colorization of an image, a tool to modify the path o a character in space, etc. The tools looked so fine that it really gave me ideas about some I should develop myself and how to figure out when you need to build tools or not.

Radiohead thinks this stuff is cool by Mikko Haapoja

Well since Radiohead likes this I had to go see this presentation. Also, yesterday Mikko (@mikkoh) won the award for Best Canadian Developer Website (category which I was also a contender, congrats Mikko) as part of the FITC Awards, so I couldn’t miss this one. He spoke about how he was building a Voxel engine that he calls the Fancy engine. A voxel engine is basically a 3D engine, but instead of having your model being represented by a mesh of triangles, your models are represented by points (pixels) in 3D space. It was pretty interesting (and also pretty technical) to see how he was implementing this and gave me the will to find a pet project for my own.

Terraforming Narrative by Alex McDowell

It is impressive the amount of experience this guy has. He worked as a production designer on such movies as Fight Club, The Crow, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Minority Report, etc, where he was building props to make the set come alive. What is also impressive is all the thinking that goes into everything. He gave an example of the house in Fight Club, where they wrote a narrative for the house as if it was a character and gave it a background that dated 100 years back. That way, everybody working on the house knew why it had to be built in a certain way. This talk really got me thinking and I made a lot of connections between this presentation and the North Kingdom presentation where the story and the details where very important.

The Grammar of interactive design by Brendan Dawes

This was a very entertaining presentation. Brendan Dawes (@brendandawes) is an awesome speaker, if you get a chance you should go see him speak (I’ll say the same thing about Joshua Davis (@joshuadavis), he falls in the same category). This was the second best presentation I saw, after Jason Theodor. Anyway, he explained that by using simple strategies we can enhance the interactive experiences we build. These strategies are using silence, surprise, rhythm, subtraction, magic and serendipity. For each of those he gave an example outside of the interact world an one example that applied to it. I really enjoyed his talk.

For a developer it is always good to see creative and I actually think that I get more out of the artistic presentations because they are topics that I am not that often exposed to. It was an awesome day; come back tomorrow for my recap of the last day of FITC Toronto 2010.

1 Comment »