Farewell Toronto
Its been a fantastic weekend for EyeWonder attendees here in Toronto at FiTC. The event was well-balanced, jammed full of fantastic presentations, and the parties were of course awesome. Some of the highlights:
- Sneaks on Flash Media Server 3.0 - there are some innovations having to do with H.264 and stream switching which will drastically change the performance of our video ads. I can’t wait for us to start working with the new stuff. I also am interested to see how this affects some of EyeWonder’s recent work in the in-stream market.
- Grant Skinner’s favorite things - I’ve seen Grant talk before, but he discussed some of his more experimental tactics. He’s always fantastic at explaining how he approaches things without overwhelming people. If you’ve never checked out his site - I highly recommend it (www.gskinner.com/blog), but it looks like he’ll also be posting conference notes here in the next few days.
- 2.5D vs. 3D discussions - there were three areas of note here - the 3d panel, Ralph’s solo presentation which was great (although I missed a little running late from lunch), and several sneaks in the Adobe keynote. Adobe showed some very cool future animation/tweening tactics to lower the entry level for creating 3d animation. The conference had a panel with several Adobe product managers as well as some of the smartest dudes around on the subject. One thing of note that I think is useful, for those of us in the advertising world, is the thought that you don’t have to spend all this time learning something like papervision if you don’t want to - often times creating a small animation and either exporting as a video or series of bitmaps will make more sense. Pro: 3D libraries for flash afford you are the ability to allow for interactivity, and also to save on bandwidth, Con: CPU usage for any vector-based animation is something you’ll want to consider carefully.
- McDonald’s happy meal workflow - Julian is always really smart about presenting things that are both techy and practical, so it was fun to see how Fuel conquered their most recent cross-promotional endeavor with an international happy meal project. He discussed a lot about what technologies/tools they used to make internal communication and the final execution both successful and efficient, and I’d be surprised if a lot of folks didn’t walk away with the correct notion that they need to start using things like bugzilla and subversion to vastly improve their own team process.
That’s it for now - hopefully some of our agency friends will win some fun awards at the final event tonight - good luck everybody!