Back from the north, ya’ll
Well, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks for me at EyeWonder, with trips out to LA and then Toronto back to back. Amazingly enough, LA was quite a bit colder than Toronto overall, which was quite unexpected! Flash in the Can was amazing. Lots of great information, and incredibly intelligent, talented, knowledgeable people, and most of all a ton of fun! We have many notes from the conference, so I thought I’d just highlight some of the things I found the most exciting.
First of all, a sprinkling of awesome people that I got to meet: Big names Kevin, Emmy, Justin, Mike, and more from Adobe (see their blogs on the left), Grant Skinner, Josh from Big Spaceship, Kenny from Dreamsocket (who did some amazing interactive work on many well-known flash video players), Sam, the advergamer from Neopets, and even some of our Atlanta neighbors from IQ interactive. There are too many to really list out everybody we talked to, but it was so impressive to be around so many brilliant people. John Maeda, who has put out quite a few books on interactive design, also had an inspiring keynote address.
The most impressive thing about the conference, to me anyway, was the focus on detail. All the presentations were very solid and well-thought-out. Also, there are a lot of agencies and small companies doing some incredible work with Flash 8 or 9 video, and even more making strides to do very cool things with Flex, Apollo, and the new Flash Media Server. There is a lot of amazing work out there, and here are just a few of the sites that really stood out in my mind:
http://www.gettheglass.com - There is just some incredible Flash video work combined with some PaperVision dice.
http://www.nike.com/nikeair/us/ - More cool video work with Flash
http://www.rolex.com/ - Incredibly detailed work from Critical Mass
http://www.papervision3d.org - Unbelievable 3D rendering engine for use within Flash
http://www.chumby.com/ - Ryan may or may not have paid these guys under the table to “win” one of these puppies
Also - EyeWonder wants to extend a huge congrats to our friends at RED who won two awards at the FITC awards show for their self-promotional site, including best of show!! Way to go guys!