This past week I was able to spend some time at the Flashforward conference, held here in San Francisco at the Nob Hill Masonic Center. Flashforward is a conference and showcase for the Flash design and development community. By my rough count, it brought together together a crowd of about 600–800 artists.
Some thoughts on Flashforward:
There was an inspiring keynote on the first day by Miha Pogacnik, a concert violinist whose talk focused on drawing the analogy of Bach’s Fugue in G Minor to life. He threw out a few interesting thoughts: normality is the worst thing for you, and question everything. I enjoyed the talk quite a bit, and it reminded me of a TED talk by Benjamin Zander on music and passion
At one point on the first day, Keith Peters asked for the crowd to raise their hands if they came from a computer science background. Crickets, and a few hands. From art and design? By far the vast majority of the room. The people in the room were all very different from the standard developer crowd, with the majority coming from interactive agencies.
Some cools links: flashscene.org — links to interesting Flash design/art demos, and also some picks from the Film Festival finalists: Contrapunctus Variations, Launchball, ensemble, and Twang — winner of the people’s choice award.
The Flashforward Film Festival, an awards show in various categories of Flash development, had lots of stunning content. A great deal of the finalists were commercial, but there was also some interesting indie work too. Along with a few highlights above, you can view all of the finalists here. It’s amazing to see the work that people are building in Flash. This is a short video I took of the Gaming showcase.
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