I started off day 1 with “Open Source Flash 3D” with John Lindquist from the Papervision 3D team. Who you can follow on Twitter via @johnlindquist . John Talked about the Past, Present and Wild Assumptions on the future of 3D on the Web. He also spoke in length comparing the big 3 players out there right now. Flash, Unity3d and WebGL. WebGL is the low, unheard of player in this game, However one thing to note with WebGL is its not plugin required. You can View Source on this.. HTML5.
We all know Flash, as John said in his presentation “Some say Adobe missed the 3d Boat”. Maybe… However Adobe still has several benefits that Unity3d is yet to bring which includes Webcam and audio support.
Unity 3d is another plugin install. With a Very low saturation rate… You may be hard pressed to get a user to install something they most likely have not heard of before. However Unity3d’s quality far surpasses Flash & Paper vision. If your building a game for the web or mobile, Unity3d may be worth a look.
Second Session of the Day I attended ( Keep in mind there are 5 sessions running at a time. So make your picks Wisely) Now i don’t know what went on in the other 4 sessions.. But I definately made the right choice going for “The Importance of Whiskey While Working… (And other work flow tips too!)” Presented by Jamie Kosoy from bigspaceship . You can follow him via Twitter @jkosoy . If you can take 1 word from his presentation its “Collaboration”. Your typical company operates in what would be called a “WaterFall” System. Sales, Design, Production and Launch. Everyone has their part… everyone washes their hand at the end. this is as Jamie put it “Bad”. At Big Space Ship the system goes Sideways. Strategy, Production, Design and Development. They all have their input from beginning to end. They work in Project Teams. Each different discipline is represented for each project. Devs and Designers are in the same meeting as the strategists putting out ideas and setting accurate time lines, Jamie says to “Dream Big” in these sessions… and scale back depending on time-line and client budget.
I think one of the most encouraging things Jamie brought up was the humble beginnings of Big Space Ship, back in the day landing a Movie Website for a Romantic Comedy. Doing a great job, they got pinned as the best “Romantic Comedy Website Company” and signed themselves another few Romantic Comedy websites. Finally getting themselves a Horror film… and it blew up from there. Jamie defiantly did a much better job telling that story and im not doing it justice.
The Adobe Keynote was alright, and The last session of the day was an inside view of North Kingdom here is their most recent demo reel:
North Kingdom Showreel 2009 from Designchapel on Vimeo.
We got a great insight into the creative process and techniques and display the many challenges they face from clients, users and the business in general.
To wrap the day up I will leave you with 1 tip from Jamie at Bigspaceship. I dont have it word for word so I am going to ad lib here a bit:
Spend the time to come up with a consistent naming convention for the site to ensure everyone is talking about the same thing, and give this naming convention to the client to make sure when they are talking, everyone knows what is being talked about.
Tags: #FITC, Conference, Flash
