This presentation was a blatant product pitch for Camtasia Studio. If that weren't bad enough, it was pretty clear that the presenter (Brooks Angus) did not want to be be doing the presentation. As this was the first workshop I attended at FITC, I was pretty disappointed. I was hoping this wasn't going to be a weekend of product pitches. The only takeaway about Flash video that weren't specific to Camtasia from the workshop were:

The ON2 VP6 codec has an excellent size to quality ratio (thanks I knew that)
The codec is Flash 8 only
TechSmith recommends sticking to 44.1 Khz audio

If you want to learn about the software being pitched, Mr. Angus promised to post his presentation on his blog.

I'd rather have been: getting a back massage with sand paper. Hit or Miss : Miss

While this was an improvement over the first presentation I attended, it still wasn't good so I marked it a miss. Why no good? Well this wasn't a product pitch, but it felt like a company pitch for Addkt Design Movement. Fortunately, Addkt's work is good, so the workshop was entertaining, but there was not much to learn from this presentation.

I'd rather have been: at the Sustaining Creativity workshop. Hit or Miss : Miss

After being 0 for 2 at my very first FITC conference, I was delighted that this next one was so good. It was one of the best at the show. Presenter Adam Boozer (real name) from IQ Interactive did a great job of not just pitching his company's work, but sharing advice about they successfully completed really big projects. He was specific about collaboration, project management and creative tools. This is how a presentation should be done.

Check out the projects Adam used as his examples:

Freedom of the Seas
VW Features this was completed in just 4 weeks!

Finally a great presenter: Boozer rules, I traded for his card. Hit or Miss : Hit

This was the Adobe keynote of the conference. We got to see previews of:

Adobe Apollo
Adobe Flex
and Flash 9 Player with awesome performance upgrades

The only bad thing about this presentation was that it was in a big dark room right after lunch. *yawn*

Everyone from my work that went to FITC attended this conference. A workshop about Flash and TV seemed like something that would be really relevant to our work at in an interactive shop at a broadcaster. Instead of learning anything though, we were punished with demos of Windows Media Centre buffering video for 45 minutes. Ugh. The presenter did not stop talking to take a breath- not once! I think he's a bot.

Joshua Davis covered his creative approach for creating media projects. He's unique in creating print design in Flash. His work relies a lot on randomness and he uses Flash to generate art the he uses to design for corporations. It's a really different approach and shows that not everything has already been done before. As our tools change, so can our ideas.

Macromedia Flex has recently had a price drop from $15,000 to $0 to get developers using this program. Flex is specifically made to create Flash web applications instead of Flash animations. Presenter Sho Kuwamoto promises Flex is easier than Flash for this purpose and the demo shows he's right. Cool technology and a good presentation. Yes, it was a product pitch, but done well and it was very obvious that it would be a pitch from the workshop's title, so I didn't feel tricked.

I had no idea how much RFID technology has proliferated before I attended this workshop. RFID tags were even in our FITC passes. Radio transmitters had been installed in 3 tables in the exhibition area that would greet you on a big screen when you walked within 30 cm of them. After the workshop, everyone who attended went and experimented with the tables. "Welcome to Table 1, Guinevere" the screen printed. When I was done, "Table 1 will miss Guinevere" was displayed on the screen. Neat! What was a little scary is the presenters giving examples of practical uses of RFID tags and alarming uses in the same breath.

There's a competition on creating a Flash interface from the data gathered from a party held the first night of the conference.

This was the first panel discussion that I attended in the conference. It was... really bizarre. The moderator started off the Q&A with the panelists like this, "With deforestation, global warming, wars, issues like Abu Ghraid, how do you see the future of design?" WTF?

Bizarre questions were met with equally bizarre predictions that seemed to be blue sky guesses, rather than anything based in reality. One guy figured that today's tweens won't allow their creative revolution to be categorized or marketed. Where does that come from? These are the kids with iPods attached to their hips, cell phones to their ears and labels on every bit of clothing. Why will they suddenly turn away from their brands? Sounded more like wishful thinking.

Fortunately it wasn't all bad. 2 of the panelists had some interesting points:
Treating your users with respect makes for more clever work
Logo trends are a reflection of our time
Shifting brand looks (a-la-MTV) appeals to younger generations
Update your designs to make it relevant within a new time or context

My opinion is biased about this workshop. I've been a fan of the bunny movies since they came out in '04. This presentation was by Jennifer Shiman, who creates the bunny parody movies. She talked about how she went from a degree in international business to a full time animator with no creative or animation background. She was unhappy in her job and had always loved cartoons. She heard of a program called Flash, bought it, taught herself and released a parody of The Exorcist which became wildly successful all through viral marketing. Her biggest piece of advice was to not to try and make something viral, as it usually fails. It has to become viral on its own. And how does that happen? She figured it was a fluke, but I disagree. There are definite reasons why some things become viral and it starts and ends with good content. Jennifer makes about 1 bunny piece per month, doesn't need a second job and earns more of her money from license fees.

Learn more about viral marketing at VBMA.net.

You can tell when a guy is a professional speaker for a living. Tom Green is a published author and college professor that could probably make the manufacture of urinal cakes sound interesting. This workshop was an excellent balance of technical how-to and impressive examples of what can be done with Flash 8 video. Visit Tom On The Web for his web site and this presentation.

There were 2 reasons I picked this workshop. 1) I had been to a panel discussion earlier and it sucked so badly that I expected the same from another panel at this time and 2) the presenter works for Blast Radius which is quite successful in the field. I wanted to hear how they do what they do.

Unfortunately, while Brendan Lynch might be a great coder, he's not a great presenter. He seemed SO bored at his own work. It didn't really get me excited about it. Furthermore, it was cool technology, but he admitted at the end of the presentation that his whole solution may be obsolete with Actionscript 3.0. Dagnabit! Why did I sit here for an hour then?

Julie went to "It's a Mobile World: Built It and They Will call" and said it was actually decent. Doh!

9 a.m. on a Sunday and I pick a discussion about copyright? As boring as it sounds, this was one of the best of show as well. The panelists were very diverse from a young buck promoting Open Source to a bitter middle aged guy in the software industry. A representative from Electronic Frontier Foundation was very informed and an excellent source of information on all facets of online copyright. Aral Balkan from OSFlash.org made it sound exciting to be part of collaborative projects. Another panelist present was Jason who was introduced as the creator of Hotline. Quite a controversial claim to make considering the history of the Hotline application. I didn't bring it up, as it was off-topic and the guy was so bitter.

Back to copyright... most of the discussion was over the Creative Commons license, what copyright protects and doesn't, patents and contracts. Sounds boring? It was actually really good and I was glad to be up and to the conference on time to attend this discussion.

Kevin Airgid is another one of those great presenters. He was a self-promoter and educator at the same time. He uses specific examples from his own work that made his freelance career more successful. Kevin's advice is:

Develop good phone skills.
Listen to what your client wants.
Don't make your Flash site "too advanced"- Kevin's simplistic home page increased his sales 30%.
Watch your web site statistics- make the most important pages on your site the most accessible.
Get your clients to buy into your services, not sell them your services.
Develop rapport with your clients so they think of you as a resource.

Pretty straightforward stuff, delivered in a pretty straightforward manner. The big idea I disagreed with is he insists on giving clients freebies so they come to him with future work. I've done that way too much and think it's better to concentrate on creating great work and ask people to pay for that work, so they appreciate your value.

This was just a presentation of the Cow Abduction project. The project is funny, entertaining and it made us all laugh. But... I didn't come here just to surf a web site. how about some things learned from doing it? How did they measure success? Buzz, web impressions, or sales? Nothing like this was covered unfortunately. How about a bit about different interactive advertising products, not just a microsite? Hrm... :(

Big Spaceship made one kick-ass site for the movie Underworld Evolution and other entertainment projects. They don't have sales people, their portfolio and word of mouth gets them new work. It's no surprise because their work is very cool and Big Spaceship knows it. They were kind of like a high school girl that knows she's pretty. You get sick of their verbal masturbation and self-appreciation so that they become less attractive in your eyes. You can't balk at their success at web designers, but at presenters? Not so much.

I signed up for "Adapting Ideas: Media & Devices" but it was cancelled, so went to this instead. There was a panelists of people from Adobe and Macromedia (now part of Adobe) who wanted our feedback on what we disliked in their current products and wanted to see in future products. Cool opportunity! They also gave us some hints of what is coming in future versions of Adobe apps:

Copy/paste between Illustrator & Flash
Illustrator to FLA export
Cue points reading from video apps to Flash
Possible object based timeline in Flash
Colour management and palette sharing via the web

And here's a cool bit of info: there are currently NO plans to phase any products out, even though the merger made Adobe owner of competing projects. This I am sure will change over time.

Sounds cool, but the reason I marked this as a miss is the number of dumb-ass questions posed by the audience. That's no fault of the panel, but they really needed to plan and execute better moderation in the session.

After an afternoon of misses, I had to go to a workshop that said attendees would leave with "happiness". Daw. This was an abstract workshop run by Stephan Sagmeister who described how he likes to integrate the emotion of happiness into his life and into his designs. It wasn't what I expected, but very interesting. I filled out the workshop feedback card with the phrase, "Very deep, man". Didn't learn much about Flash though.