Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff06: day one

I’m in Seattle with a coworker for the Flash Forward conference, a twice-yearly gathering of Flash designers and developers.

We spent most of the day at Robert Reinhardt’s workshop on Flash Video. The first half of the session was, perhaps unsurprisingly, pretty heavy on video production: cameras, green screens, lighting and such. He videotaped a conference staffer giving a fake product pitch, and then he used that footage to demonstrate how to produce a video for Flash with a transparent background, via Adobe After Effects and Sorenson Squeeze. I had come in with a vague idea of how it was done, but it was really cool to actually see it in action.

I also had a “monolith moment” when Reinhardt used the XML Connector component in Flash to feed data into a surprisingly simple video playlist. I knew the component was available, but I’d never used it before. Now I’ll have to try.

We also ducked into the last portion of Aral Balkan’s “ActionScript for Right Brainers” session. I enjoyed the session Balkan taught in New York last year about object-oriented programming; his workshop today was basically a day-long version of the same thing. We’d hoped to hear him talk about Flash Remoting and design patterns, but he spent most of the session demonstrating how to program a tween.