What I did at Flash on the Beach

Flash on the Beach, the UK’s premier Flash event, took place last week in Brighton. There was a strong thread of generative art running through the conference, and how it can be used to create things that would be barely physically possible using traditional illustrator skills.

This post is going to be a bit epic, so here’s a pretty picture. The rest of the text follows after the break.

Joshua Davies talked about using simple bits of code in flash and movieclips drawn on a tablet to create print artwork (technique for outputting flash to illustrator for printing at http://workshop.joshuadavis.com/)

http://www.joshuadavis.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuadavis

All this stuff looks great in print (brilliant to get it off the screen)

Robert Hodgin (http://www.flight404.com/blog/) showed some incredibly beautiful work built in processing (and showed a little how processing could be used commercially – see tech blog).

The most well known of which is this:

http://www.flight404.com/_videos/magnetosphere/index.html

He then showed a newer version that was even more incredible.

My personal favourite was Jared Tarbell who started and runs http://www.etsy.com/ (which has some interesting alternative navigation within it). He talked about how simple algorithms can create something beautiful and unexpected:

One simple example being: click anywhere in the page to create some random animating lines, when they hit another line stop the animation and create to more lines that animate at right angles. Which creates this (once shading has been added):

http://www.levitated.net/

http://complexification.net/

http://flickr.com/photos/generated/sets/72157594149046982/

I was very frustrated to miss a session by Eric Natzke (the image at the start of the post is by him), go here if you have time:

http://jot.eriknatzke.com/

There was also some pretty good motion design sessions, but they were a little too ‘look at my portfolio, isn’t it nice’ for me :

http://www.gmunk.com/

Very interesting to see how quick and easy it can be to build very quick/impressive stings in Maya.

http://www.theronin.co.uk

Some good shorts built in After Effects.

Both of these seemed obsessed with the super fast cut, which definitely wasn’t the case for quietly spoken Hilman Curtis (http://www.hillmancurtis.com/) who did a really mellow session about one of his short films. He does a lot of corporate design work and used to do a lot of Flash experimentation way back when. He now makes films to have a ‘conversation with himself’ away from corporate worries.

http://www.hillmancurtis.com/hc_web/film_video/source/fof/embrace.php

Dr. Woohoo talked about http://www.inthemod.com/ and integrating it directly into Illustrator. He made a SWF panel directly in Illustrator that he could use to load a modified version of ‘in the mod’ (which analyses an image and makes a colour palette from it), he could then look at any image online or locally and load the palette of colours used in that picture as a normal Illustrator palette swf.

There was also lots more cross package shenanigans (automating random stuff between Illustrator, After Effects, Photoshop and Flash) and a reasonably good session on sound design too…