Day 1

I thought it would be a good day to keep my habits going in Amsterdam, so I turned up 15 minutes late for the beginning of the first day. Happily I didn’t miss much new stuff. In fact, I didn’t miss a single thing.

Ever since I started going to conferences, they always began with the Adobe Keynote. Today would be no different. Adobe would come on stage and talk about their latest numbers and how fast the latest version of the Flash Player is spreading among the internet’s users. 2 years ago, I would listen with full attention and be amazed by all those details. However on monday: I couldn’t be bothered. It’s great how fast the player is spreading but it’s really not worth half of the duration of the Keynote…
The rest of the keynote would be about the Flash Player on mobile devices. I think it’s a great step forward and I’m looking forward to future development on that aspect of the platform but the guys on stage just couldn’t interest me. So I left the keynote early.

Weirdly for the first time in Ronny-history, the second session of an event would not be Aral Balkan-branded… Which was odd to me. I kinda took it for granted he would be there… Which he wasn’t.

At this point of writing I realize I could just summarize the whole event and while most people might want me to do exactly that… I don’t think it’s worth it.

While being there, watching the sessions, I realized that in fact conferences/festivals have changed. Or at least my vision on this has changed. I ended up going from session to session and listen to various people talk about their past projects. And while some of those sessions really dazzled me, most of them didn’t. In fact I got bored a few times (and as a result I left the session and I honestly think that’s pretty rude of me for the speaker at hand).

I didn’t come to Amsterdam to watch you show me all your work of 5 years ago, which were just a few images taken from your portfoio. I did come here to see new stuff. New ideas. Your latest revelations. Your ‘best of 2009′ so to speak.
At some point I was sitting in a session, listening to somebody talk about ‘what he liked 10 years ago’. Not to be rude, (because this CAN be interesting): I don’t care. What does interest me is: Why did you like that 10 years ago? Have you changed your mind ever since? What did it do to your life as an artist? How does that inspiration reflect in your work? But those questions weren’t answered.

I can see all kinds of stuff on the internet. What I’m here to see is what nobody knew! Everybody can see your portfolio on the web. But now you’re on stage, talking to the very people that came from far away to listen to you. Make sure it’s worth the journey. Inspire us, educated us, challenge us. Do anything but to make me realize that this is a talking portfolio.

So I stopped going to the sessions that looked interesting to me (since I made all the wrong choices to that point) and ended up going to sessions that -at first hand- didn’t look all that fascinating. I ended up having my jaw dropped to the floor multiple times.

Talks that really did the trick

Hoss Gifford – Things I’ve learned
I first met Hoss in Kortrijk, a few years ago, at Multi-Mania where he talked about the narrative of an application. And while the subject was really interesting, Hoss kind of went over the top and labeled himself with ‘bad presenter‘ and ‘boring‘ for years. I would not go to his sessions because of what happened that day in Kortrijk.
However being there and making different choices, I decided to go to his session anyway. And god, did he make a comeback. Hoss turned up all relaxed with very simple slides. He talked about the things he learned. And not in a very enthousiast and screaming way most of us expected. He was all serious and personal during the complete session. It wasn’t boring, but it wasn’t entertaining. It was something deeper. It seemed as if he tried to teach us about how important life is. He didn’t mess about. He was very mysterious and yet completely open… It’s pretty difficult to express how great his session was. If you have the chance to attend his talk anytime soon: Please do. You’ll end up feeling like a better person. And for that I’m grateful, Hoss.

Ralph Hauwert – Skunkworks
I’ve been to Ralph‘s sessions before. Last year he talked about PapervisionX and how he experimented with Alchemy and Pixelbender to get the best out of it. Since experimentation and exploration is really my cup of tea, I just had to go. And just like last year, Ralph didn’t disappoint. He revealed a few secret tricks (the most interesting one being how he did his Bloom part) and one of his latest experiments. He really went a long way explaining a lot of cool and interesting stuff to show his final demo and with that to conclude his session.
One thing I adore about Ralph is how he knows the exact amount of time to keep you looking at something boring before blowing your mind with the real shit. That’s exactly what he did during the last few minutes of his session: He started the final demo, good music came out of the speakers, but the visuals weren’t all that mindblowing. We were seeing some kind of 3D lightmaps (I think those should serve for raytracing, but I can’t really remember. I’m not all that great with 3D… Don’t hate me for not exactly remembering it, Ralph), which didn’t look very special. After some time (the exact time before you would get bored), the real magic kicked in… And with that the entire room echoed a sudden bang that sounded a lot like dropping jaws. Really dope stuff, Ralph (no, really! ‘Wow’ is all I can say). Looking forward to seeing where you’re heading with this.

Jared Tarbell – The strangest things I’ve seen
Another session I went to, which normally I wouldn’t. And again: Golden. Jared is a very different man when comparing to most speakers at FITC. Most people would blow your mind with insanity in a box. Jared makes you look around and realize how amazing life is. As a relatively young man with lots of bad experiences, I am grateful for the fact that I ended up having a very good live with lots of possibilities and opportunities. Jared emphasized that feeling in the blink of an eye. Sometimes you have to be told how great something is, before you see it yourself. That’s exactly what Jared did. And he’s amazingly good at it. Jared is the kind of man that takes grace in every single thing he encounters. He seems to be easily delighted by life. To me , Jared’s facial expression seemed to be what ‘happiness’ would look like if you could see it. Afterwards, I walked away from that session, wondering why I never looked at life the way he did. I felt a different person.

MK12 – From DIY to 007
Never having heard of MK12, and having misinterpreted the title of the session, I sat down hoping to see a few cool DIY tricks that would look as if the results were taken from a 007 movie. As it turns out, I was completely wrong. But I ended up having a great time. Shaun Hamontree would talk about past projects and reveal how they did it. Quickly after that, he told us the story about how they fought their way into the latest Bond-movie.

For the longest time I’ve been taking on projects with only one mindset: “If I can think it, I can make it“. Turns out the people over at MK12 believe in something similar. They were determined to be part of that movie and they pushed every little opportunity to the envelope. They went through a great deal of hard work to only get opportunities… And it resulted in headshots. 1 chance, 1 victory. What started as a little project (that had yet to be selected by the directors of the movie) ended up as the main movie Bond-credits-intro and the interactive computer walls in the movie.

MK12 proves the concept of “If you really want to make something happen, you can“. I have great respect for that.

GMUNK – Munko’s grip
I knew about GMUNK, and how they create awesome motion graphics and other cool shit. I didn’t go to any of his sessions yet. However this seemed to be a great opportunity to give it a shot. So I did. GMUNK showed off his latest projects and talked about the process to make it happen. It’s great to see a man really involve himself in his work. He talked about how he loved doing anti-smoking campaigns and how he didn’t want to create visuals for a car he didn’t even remotely like. I respect people that put love and soul in their work. It sets them apart from the people that only enjoy the money (and believe you me! They are out there!). GMUNK proved talent and dedication and made me realize that we were pretty similar (only does he rock where as I totally don’t )

The Cool shit hour
The session title kinda says it all. 60 minutes of cool shit. A few members of the community were asked to show off something cool they made. So they did! The 2 topics that really caught my attention were Star Wars Trench Run and a Demo-invitation.
The demo invitation was actually about going retro using Actionscript. The presenter (which right now turns out to be nameless to me… Somebody help me out here, please) Peter Nitsch showed a few experiments using Alchemy and ASCII-art and ended with the mindblowing Actionscript based animation he created. I loved his presentation because of the spontaneous approach. He didn’t go into boring details and sticked to fun stuff instead.
The other part I really liked was Chris Allen showing Infrared5‘s latest creation: Brass Monkey! Brass Monkey is framework that enables multiple devices to connect to eachother over WIFI and talk to eachoter with no servers involved (I can’t remember if Brass Monkey is written in Objective-C or another language).
To show off this cool part of technology they updated their existing Star Wars Trench Run game (both the web and the iPhone game). The result was the iPhone connecting to the laptop (over WIFI) and turning the iPhone into a game-pad for the in-browser game: A full game experience for less than 5$ (3,99$ for the iPhone game, 0,99$ for the game-pad update). He was looking for a volunteer to proof it’s really responsible. Seen as nobody seemed to be up for the challenge, I decided I’d use the force and give it a run. I had the greatest time, standing in front of a 400 people audience, playing a browser game on a big screen projection over WIFI using an iPhone game-pad. How cool is that!? I’m really looking forward to see more cool stuff like this! This is what I call ‘creating better experiences‘!

Personally I think the combo of Brass Monkey, iPhone Dev and Unity3D could become a (small) rival for the Wii. The graphics are great, the responsiveness is perfect and the production cost is way lower. Not to mention the low buy-in cost for the consumer (buy the iPhone application to enable the game pad on your device for a few bucks and start having fun).

FITC Amsterdam 2010 was pretty great. I did miss a few great names like Joshua Davis, Aral Balkan and Keith Peters. And the parties (oh yes, I really enjoyed those last year!). But altogether I had a great time. I met so many new people, I saw so many cool things and I really felt inspired again. It was really fabulous!
I am already looking forward to FITC Amsterdam 2011 (and I secretly hope it will be a bit hotter than this year). See you in 349 days all!

At the same time I would like to thank everybody who every paid me a visit here, who supported me during my projects and experiments,  who commented, … Hell, everybody who has ever visited my site! This might sound pretty cheesy but let’s face it: With millions of websites out there, hundreds of thousands of Flash-related blogs, having that much visitors really delights me. People reading my blog – giving me an audience to express my thoughts, talk about my experiences and opinions- really means a lot to me. I really want to thank you for that!

A new year always starts a bit empty to me… The only thing on your plate are your new year’s resolutions. So let’s take a look back at what happend during my 2009:

• I finally joined Facebook
• I went to Denmark
• In October, Dorien and I were together for 3 great years.
• I updated Playr to V2
• Playr got downloaded 1 456 times
• I shot 76 592 pictures with my DSLR
• I shot 48 timelapses
• I uploaded 230 photos to Flickr
• I uploaded 17 videos to Vimeo
• I wrote 3 344 Tweets on Twitter
• I posted 520 Facebook status updates.
• I gave a run at 156 experiments
• I managed to complete 107 experiments
• 12 of those made it to a post on this blog
• I wrote a 45 blogposts
• I wrote a tutorial for the magazine Publish
• I released Dooodl, a fun WordPress plugin
• Dooodl got downloaded 1 876 times
• Using Dooodl on this blog, visitors drew 588 doodles (Thanks for every single one of them!)
• The busiest day on my blog was september 24th, when I hit 829 unique visitors after having published and released the Dooodl plugin on the WordPress repository
• I got a total of 62 924 unique visitors
• Those visitors left me 265 comments
• I finally got myself a Fisheye lens for my DSLR
• I ran 170,8km using Nike+
• I tagged 173 projects I ran into online as ‘PFS‘ (Pretty F#cking Sweet)
• I faved 185 pictures on Flickr
• I wrote one amazing and very interesting statistical report about my life online
• and I spent waaaaay too much time on computers

And that’s it! Let’s see what 2010 will have in for me… Enjoy the ride, guys and gals!
See you soon, I hope.

Here goes!

1. One of the coolest things I did this year was doing all kinds of experiments. Not only did I learn tons of stuff off that, I also got to pulverize the limits of possibilities I had about a year ago. Ever since I started experimenting the way I did I learned that if I can think it, I can make it.
   Seen as this is 2010, the magic number is 10.
   This year I’ll be creating 10 big experiments (something that really makes me scratch my head) that teach me at least 1 new thing.
2. For 3 years I’ve been saying it, and goddamn it: This year it’s gonna happen. I’ll get my head around a major AS3 3D engine and start actively using them.
3. The last few weeks I’ve been looking into RED5/FMS and socket-programming in AS3/PHP. In 2010 I’ll learn how to create serverside applications for real-time Flash clients. I want to be able to do anything: Save every message send to the server in a database, save video streams on the server, serve livestreams (audio/video 1-to-many Flash apps), serve streaming media… You know: anything (from now on referred to as ‘the business‘).
4. Create a movie and submit it to the local video-wall. (For those of you who don’t know: Kortrijk has a public video wall on the market place. Anyone can submit videos. If they like it they’ll show it on there for some time)
5. Rewrite Playr from scratch. I’ve learned a lot of new stuff which should enable me to create an even better Playr.
6. Push out a new version of Dooodl, the WordPress fun plugin for your visitors.

That’s it!
The 6 things I really want to make happen this year.
Is it too geeky? Should I add some others too? You think I should add some others…
Alright… I’ll add some others…

1. Back in June, I went to Copenhagen to go get Dorien who’s been there for more than 5 months. I stayed with here in Copenhagen for 5 days and I had a great time. So this next year in 2010, I really want to travel more.
2. I really REALLY need to do some sports again. Running, swimming, biking, skating, anything! I really started again during the summer holidays in July and August and it felt pretty good to be back in shape. So… More sports!
3. And while I’m at it: I need to lay off the junk food, or I’ll shred my liver or something. I need to start eating more healthy again. More vegetables, less french fries…
4. A few years back I did some bungee-jumps. This year, I want to do at least one parachute jump. Thomas, a good friend of mine, did one 2 years ago. I want to do one just like it!
5. I need to get my driver’s license. I’ve been postponing this thing for years. I’m addicted to speed, and therefor I’m dangerous. I always figured I’m just not ready yet to drive a car. However I’m past that and as a matter of fact: I’ll be needing a driver’s license when I start applying for a job… So having one might literally pay off.

Looking better, right?
What? Self-centered? Hmz… You might be right…
Let’s add a few more… It is going to be a long year…

1. I want to inspire more people. In the past year, so many people have done so many cool things and a bunch of them said they were somehow inspired by me. Not only did that put one big smile on my face, it made those people discover new things! And more: It inspired me right back! It’s a win-win, it’s for free and it comes with a big smile!
2. The past 3 years I found myself helping a lot of people out I want to help people even more. I always wanted to put up a few tutorials on my site… But I didn’t really be able to set up a routine that makes it easy for me to actually do this. Right now I’m thinking about 2 things:
   * Start a tutorial site, comparable with gotoAndLearn.com. I wouldn’t be doing this to compete with Lee in any way. I just do it to contribute to the community.
   * Set up a weekly/monthly podcast with a few friends where we share new things we learned/discovered/found/etc.
   I’m still not sure what to do… Feel free to suggest anything
3. A few months back I felt the need to lay down a part of my responsibility as chairman on FlashFocus. Mark was kind enough to take over the site administration and left me to administer everything off the site (public appearances, interviews, on-location coverage, etc) (btw: That makes me the first FlashFocus Evangelist! How cool is that?) Anyway: about 3 weeks ago  I started a new project on FlashFocus called ‘FlashFocus Freaking Interview’. If you wonder if it is what you think it is: You’re right! It’s exactly what you think it is: I will be interviewing a (web related) community celebrity every month. The cool thing is that the FlashFocus members get to suggest questions and vote for their favorite ones. In 2010 I’m planning on bringing FlashTival, the FlashFocus Multimedia/Creative/Technical/Inspiring festival (or conference if you like), back after 5 years of being gone. Right now there are not real plans, but our team is really eager about bringing it back… So we will
   If you are willing to help FlashFocus out with this in any way: Get in touch with me and I’d be happy to talk about this!

So there we go: A short list with lots of stuff to do in only 365 days!
What are yours?