I was invited to speak for firstborn at the FITC conference that took place from April 25th - 28th at the Hilton Hotel in Toronto, Canada. Not only has it been my first time in Canada, it was also my first time as a speaker at a conference. Damn. It's been quite a while since I've been as nervous. Together with Eric I ended up sitting in front of around 300 people, giving a presentation at a conference that had some of the biggest names in the industry in the lineup (Joshua Davis - who also designed the header image you see above, Mario Klingemann, Alec Cove, Lee Brimelow, etc.) ...
The overall theme of our presentation was "Dimension Wars - Bridging the Gap between 2D and 3D in Flash". We structured our presentation from simple to complicated, so we started with fairly easy ways to fake 3D in Flash and throughout the presentation the techniques became more complex. Each chapter featured a different demo, showcasing some of firstborn's recent work.
http://www.jensfischer.us/demos/throwFish/
The first demo was from the National Grid Floe project. We showed how to use interactive video- and image-layers together with tweening and scaling, to achieve the perception of interaction in 3D space even tho it's technically a 2D environment.
http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com/websites/casestudy/Puma%20Lift/
Our next example was taken from the PUMA L.i.f.t. case study. For this project the teaser site made use of Bitmap Distortion and After Effects Motion Tracking to distort the content according to the background video, so that the content looks like it's on the cardboard that the girl in the video is holding.
http://www.wildridexm.com/
The third example was the XM Wild Ride website. We used this website to explain the basic functionality of a simple 3D engine.
http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com/#/our-portfolio/1047/case-study/
There's no presentation about Flash and 3D without at least a honorary mention of Papervision. This chapter of our presentation covered that, but the main focus instead of explaining what Papervision is and how it works was the problem solving needed when working in a 3D engine like Papervision. We showed some nice little tricks to achieve the effects and visuals you have in mind, despite all the technological restrictions (i.e. fighting performance issues due to polygon amount).
http://www.firstbornmultimedia.com/websites/casestudy/M%26M/
After having shown "fake" and "real" 3D, it was time to show a combination of both. The M&M's website used the FIVe3D engine for many things, in combination with scaling and moving simple video clips to create the feeling of a 3D environment.
http://www.jensfischer.us/demos/five3DRibbon/
Our last chapter "Don't forget about your vectors" summed up many of the points we had made before. There's not the one, perfect solution that works for each project, it's always best to look at the problem first and then find a specific solution for that. If the task at hand can be solved with vector graphics, FIVe3D is an extremely powerful tool, outperforming Papervision and the new native 3D features that come with Flash 10.
We don't have any slides for this presentation since it was mainly about showing demos - some are even missing in this list since they're not online yet or simply too small to be mentioned. If you want to know more details or have questions you can comment here, but I definitely would recommend to simply come to one of our next presentations. It was the first one both for Eric and me and there are tons of things I would do different/better now and that's exactly why I definitely want to do it again. The audience gave us a solid 8.92 out of 10, which is not bad for a first presentation in my opinion. In order for you to make your own opinion, I'll update this post as soon as the FITC team has the video online.
Related Links:
http://www.fitc.ca
http://www.bigspaceship.com/blog/labs/fitc-toronto-2009-linkdump/