FITC: Day One

I went to FITC today. Today kicks off the first day of presentations. The first thing I noticed today was that I actually understand everything that everybody is talking about, as opposed to last year when I was still doing timeline code. haha! 

Anyway, I thought I'd put together a blog of the stuff I take note of at FITC this year. Now, I look at everything through the eyes of a designer, so I tend to take in presentations that are less techie and more visually inspiring. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Here's what I took away today... In point form... Because I'm basically just typing up the notes I took today.

Adobe Keynote Speaker 

with David Wadhwani

• Mobile is growing at an alarming rate.
• Apps and app stores are also growing ridiculously fast.
• Flash has gone from being a tool to create cool animations to creating programs. Did you know that it was used to create some interfaces in cars?
• HTML5 is the answer to bridging the gap between Flash and HTML. 
• Adobe is contributing to new versions of jQuery and W3C.
• Adobe has a newsletter geared towards web designers and developers called Adobe Edge. You can check it out and subscribe here.
• Dreamweaver and InDesign can export HTML, SWF's and PDF's.
• InDesign now allows you to export interactive magazines. (I'm actually working on one of these things right now.)
• HTML5 (I think... I was writing something while he was talking quickly) has better text capabilities. It allows you to wrap text around an image or a shape more easily and effectively.
• Did you know that some Facebook games are Flash-based? (ex: Farmville)
• People spend an average of 79 minutes per day on games on their mobile devices.
• Flash Player 10.2 allows for better playing, no lagging, uses less CPU power and displays superior quality video. The quality is so good, you can play something on your tablet, plug it into your TV and there is no loss of quality.

Richard Galvan: Flash Improvements

• When you change the stage size, all frames, movie clips, etc. scale with it. This is fantastic when creating different versions of an application for different devices.
• We used to use Cache as Bitmap to rasterize our vector symbols so our file size wouldn't force the device to lag. However, doing this would turn your easily-resizable vector symbol into a rasterized bitmap. Now, you can use Export as Bitmap instead. This allows you to continue to work with your symbol as a vector object, but it is exported as a bitmap when the project is published.
• You can now do on-device debugging. This is useful for testing things like the accelerometer that you can't test easily on a desktop.

Deepa Subramaniam: Flash Builder Improvements

• Flash Builder lets you build better workflows for Flex or pure Actionscript. It's kind of like what Dreamweaver is for HTML and CSS. 
• It now has better Quick Assists for common coding functions such as for loops, getter and setter functions, etc. 
• It intuitively reminds you when you need to add related code. For example, if you add an event listener, it reminds you to create the function for it.

How do you turn this thing on? with MK12
For anyone who doesn't know, MK12 is a motion graphics company based in Kansas City, Missouri. They were the ones behind the opening credits for .007 "Quantum of Solace". Not sure which that is? Here you go:

What actually happened was that they created the title sequence for "The Kite Runner" and the director loved what they did. When he became the director on "Quantum of Solace" he asked them to do the opening credits then too.

I didn't realize, but Kansas City has a great community of artists, which is where the founders of MK12 come from. It explains why their work is so artistic and beautiful. Check out their demo reel.  

Their first short was "The Terrible Cosmic Death". 

MK12 was also one of several design companies that designed a bottle for the 2005 Coca Cola campaign. Theirs is on the far left.

MK12 are actually designers first. They're also type nerds and design their own fonts based on what they need it to look like. For example, they designed the typeface for "Quantum of Solace".


They have found that you can get ideas off of someone without even talking to them. This is why they keep their studio cubicle-free and very open-concept.


They created the short "The History of America", which is super cool. Check it out. Here's the trailer: 

MK12 continues to make shorts/self-promos to help attract new clients. A lot of the time, clients have difficulty expressing what it is they want. MK12 has found that their shorts act as great bases for clients to say "I want something like that."




And that's what I've learned today. I'll keep you posted for tomorrow.