This year I attended Flash In The Can 2011, a conference in Toronto on Design and Technology. I was always under the impression that this conference was mostly about Flash, but my friend Grant Lucas convinced me otherwise. He went to FITC last year, and told me how it was more about design, workflow, and inspiration, and little to do with Flash. This got me thinking about going to FITC 2011, but when he told me that McBess (one of my favourite artists in the world) was going to be doing a talk I immediately booked tickets to the conference.

In this post I’m going to talk about the three speakers that resonated with me the most.

Signalnoise (James White)

On the first day, I attended a talk by James White of Signalnoise called “Back to the Future II”. In his talk, James talked about how his past experiences and childhood memories has affected his artwork. James was really into heavy metal and old TV opening titles with funky colors, and you can really see that in his bright-colored, retro art.

James really emphasized how he made almost all of the artwork in his spare time, outside of work. This really got me thinking about how important is for me to keep working on art on my free time. Now that I’m finished school for good and back full-time at work, I have no excuse to put art projects aside. I felt that I really need to keep pumping out projects in order to improve my artistic skills.

Robert Hodgin

Robert Hodgin showed off some of the coolest generative art I’ve ever seen in my life. It was cool to how he’d look at things in nature, like a tree or a beach, and think of ways to reproduce it with code. He talked about some of his past projects, the challenges he faced, and how he overcame them. My favourite project of his was called “Into the Woods”, which was an audio-visual piece that he created with cellist Zoë Keating. The entire experience, including the sky, trees, grass, etc. is created with code, and is absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend checking out his project here.

Robert too talked about his past and how it influenced him. He recalled a time when he was a toddler, he was climbing Mount Fuji and he remembered being surrounded by tall trees and mist. This experience was the basis for many of his projects, including “Into the Woods”. However, it turned out that this memory was completely false, and that he was actually just at a small park in Tokyo :P

Near the end of his presentation, Robert showed off “Planetary”, an iPad app that he and his colleagues at Bloom Studio Inc. have been working on. Planetary is an app that takes your iPad’s music library, and dynamically generates a solar system based on your collection. For example, the textures of the planets are created using an artist’s album cover. For those who have an iPad, be sure to check it out on the App Store.

Generative art is something I’d definitely like to experiment with, although I severely lack in the programming skill department. I’ll start off with small particle effects projects using Processing, and then move on to using the Cinder library.

McBess (Matthieu Bessudo)

Last but not least, McBess! I’ve been a big fan of McBess’ work ever since a few years ago I saw his music video, Wood. I’ve always loved old cartoons as a kid, and love artists that use that style in their work.

I totally thought McBess made “Wood” for a band called Dead Pirates, but what I found out during the presentation was that the song was made and recorded by McBess alone, and the Dead Pirates was a fictional band with imaginary characters. Later, he formed a band with his buddies called Dead Pirates with whom he plays live shows, but it’s interesting to see how the fictional band came before the actual band.

I enjoyed seeing McBess’ projects and learning about his workflow, but what really got to me was his awesome sense of humor. He just seemed to be a really down-to-earth dude, and his slides would frequently include references to boobies and ‘wanking’. I chatted with him briefly after his presentation, and he was kind enough to answer some questions that I had for him.

Like the fanboy that I am, I got my friend to take a picture of me and McBess. To further emphasize my fanboyness I decided to wear my Dead Pirates tee that day.

Conclusion

From these three awesome individuals, I learned the following:

• Think about what excited you as a kid, and think of ways to integrate those experiences into your own work.
• Always seek inspiration. Appreciate your surroundings (places, events, people, music, etc.) and harness them into your own work.
• Don’t be afraid to try something because it’s not “original”. James White and McBess openly talked about their influences, and how it’s okay to be influenced by others. Standing on the shoulder of giants, so to speak.
• Don’t procrastinate. Keep making artwork to improve.

FITC 2011 was a blast, and I’m really glad I attended this year. I went in with little idea on what to expect, and left with a mind packed with inspiration and a stomach full of butterflies. I would definitely go back next year, if I can somehow cheat into getting a student pass ;)

Thanks again Grant for letting me know about FITC, and Shopify for letting me take time off to attend.

I thought I’d share some of my university experiences here.

Highlights:

• Diving into the world of web. Learning HTML+CSS was a bunch of fun, and I will continue learning more about it after graduation.
• Learning how to make dynamic websites with PHP. My mind was blown when I got my first PHP script running, and learned how dynamic websites work.
• Co-op at NeuroLanguage and Shopify. Spending a year working for Shopify was a blast – it was so hard going back to school afterwards. I can’t wait to go back there fulltime in May. For future IMDers, I would highly recommend taking Co-op. It’ll really help you narrow down what you really want to do as a profession. Even if you don’t like your placement, at least you’ll find out what you don’t like to do, and you can still make connections.
• Learning Processing + Arduino. Programming things that are actually tangible was an awesome experience.
• Learning how to model, rig, animate etc. in 3D using Autodesk Maya. I hated this at first but grew to like it a lot. I will continue to do 3D as a hobby in the future.

Not-so-awesome times:

• All-nighters in the labs that were hotter than Africa and smelled like B.O. PRO-TIP: Lining up 3 rolly-chairs and using it as a bed is actually really comfy.
• Having to use crappy computers in the labs that would randomly restart
• Having to use WebCT on a regular basis. Why do universities still use this piece of sh*t? There are so many better alternatives.
• Having to take courses that taught me absolutely nothing (I’m sure every program has these).
• Having to learn Macromedia Director. Seriously? It was 2007, and we still had to learn Director? Gimme a break (a year later they switched the course to Flash).

It feels weird thinking that I don’t ever have to go back to campus, or worry about schoolwork. Even though Senior Project’s been done for a week now, I still wake up thinking that I have something I need to do for it. I can’t wait to go back to the 9-5 lifestyle, as it’ll leave me with more time to work on personal projects!

THE END

Needless to say it was a wicked-awesome night. The Start, a local cover band opened the night with some kickass covers of British hits. We played our set after The Start. I was nervous as hell at first since it was our first time playing our tunes in front of an audience, but the nervousness melted away after a song or two (I think I was melting too, I was so damn sweaty on stage… sorry for the B.O., guys). The headliner band, Brainhunter ended the night with some rockin’ tunes (BRAAAAAINS anyone?).

What was cool was that the next morning, we were mentioned in Andrew Carver’s blog on National Capital Rock. He’s also got some sweet pictures from the show on his Flickr.

We’re going on a brief hiatus as Chris will be going on vacation, but things will really pick up once he comes back. I’m going to be graduated from university, and back at Shopify full-time (hopefully). We’ll be getting together more often to jam and play more shows, and we plan on recording sometime in May/June. Once we have good recordings, we’ll be launching our website.

BIG THANK YOU to everyone for coming to the show, my buddy Jesshi for the awesome pictures, Andrew Carver for mentioning us on NatCapRock, and Brainhunter & The Start for the awesome night, hopefully the first of many more.

It’s been a while since my last post, but now that I’m finally finished my winter semester I can start writing here more often. I will also try my best to catch up on unanswered comments! It’s starting to sink in that there are only two more semesters of school left… I can’t wait to finish completely!

The highlight of this past semester was diving into the world of interactive multimedia. For one of our classes, we were taught an open-source programming language called Processing. My classmates Grant Lucas, Mark Pintar and I built the ‘faceTable’, which was an interactive table display that would display the user’s Facebook information by using customized Reactivision markers. Words don’t do it justice – we will be posting videos of it in action on Vimeo once we make the demonstration videos.

Plans for the summer

This summer I’d like to find and share more hacks and tweaks in Shopify that would allow storeowners to add unique features to their store. I’d also like to write more tutorials to help storeowners get started with their stores.

In my spare time, I plan on playing around with Processing and OpenFrameworks in an attempt to create some cool visual displays. Particle systems is an example of something I’d like to create using one of these two languages. I’ll also be playing shows with the band The Mudplots, as well as work on another band project that I have brewing :)

Anyway, I’m off to kill some more time – two more hours until my flight to Toronto! Don’t fail me, Reddit…

UPDATE: A random elderly man from Calgary just approached me with a super-serious look on his face asking if I could check something for him using the wifi on my laptop. Thinking it was an emergency, I opened up my laptop. Turns out he just really needed to know the result of the Pittsburgh vs Montreal game for his hockey pool. Canadians are awesome :D

School’s been pretty hectic. MEL Scripting, marketing, and product design methodology have all been keeping me pretty busy. Because of this, I won’t be writing any Shopify-related tutorials during the semester, but I hope to get back into it during the summer.

There is one class that I really enjoy at school, taught by an awesome new teacher called James Acres. He introduced us to the world of Processing and Arduino, and it’s like discovering Lego again for the first time. It’s our first time creating interactions between the physical and digital world, and it’s truly been a fascinating experience.

March is going to be one tough month with all the assignments and whatnot, but I think it’ll go by quickly. I can’t wait for this semester to be over with!

I apologize for the lack of updates recently, I’ve been extremely busy with client projects, side projects, and moving. I do have a few Shopify tutorial ideas floating around in my mind, but I haven’t had much time to sit down and write them out. I’m hoping that in the coming weeks things will start to slow down.

So a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of my friends at Carleton University got together and started a student club called CUJA (Carleton University Japanese Association). I was appointed to be the web master and graphic designer, so I’ve been working on their branding, their website, and their membership cards. I’m still working on the mock-up of the site, shown below (a big, big thank you to my chums Mark Dunkley and Daniel Weinand for their tips and advices!).

Just yesterday one of the CUJA execs and I went to Staples to order the membership cards that I had designed. They won’t be ready for another 4-5 days, but I can’t wait to see how they turn out!

Another thing that was keeping me busy was moving. A couple of weeks ago I had moved from my former apartment to my parent’s place so that I can live with them until the new apartment becomes available. It’s my first time living at home in two years, so it was definitely a heart-warming experience (free food is also a huge plus!). I’ll be moving to the new place in about a week, and once I settle in I’ll be working more on the Shopify tutorials.

Well that’s enough rambling for today! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!