The Pixelsurgeon post-OFFF report

OFFF - Barcelona, 1st-3rd May

The sky is blue, the beer is cheap and the Online Flash Film Festival is once again up and running in Barcelona with three days of unadulterated digital design. This year the festival is being held in the Mercat de les Flors (Flower market) with sponsorship from Diesel and Nokia. It's bigger and better with more planning, better marketing and some natty merchandise (bags, tees and a nice double DVD) which all makes this year's festival a more professional affair.

There are tons of speakers appearing in three massive auditoriums, four or five installations, a mini-market selling CDs and design mags, and two graffiti artists - all for a measly 9 Euros a day! This is definitely how it should be. For more information go here: http://www.offf.org

See the speakers schedule here: http://www.offf.org/ui.html

Eric Natzke
http://www.natzke.com/

Can you believe that Eric failed every maths class at school? It's hard to believe it when you look at the kind of experimental navigation he creates with Flash. Sitting on stage behind a desk cloaked in black cloth and hunching behind his Titanium his huge frame looks deceptively small against the looming screen behind him. The master of understatement, he says things like, it's really just a few lines of code, as he brings up screen after screen of amazing experimental work illuminated by the occasional camera flash strobe. It may be all created with just a few lines of code but my God it leaves you wishing you'd just come up with those few lines.

He showed 'Walking together what remains' a piece he's shown many times before at conferences. He quickly brings up the .fla file as an example of what he calls his stubbornness to find solutions. There are over 800 layers here, he explains as everyone in the auditorium leans forward to get a closer look. "If I find something I want to do in Flash, I just have to keep trying and trying to find a way to do it." His quest to find out more about what he can do with maths in Flash has him regularly visiting his local library to find out more about SIN, COS and Pi.

Next up, a piece he'd created for HP (http://www.hp.com/country/us/eng/msg/corp/
flashdreamworks.html) - an animation showing information on Shrek. "I wanted to create an online book that really looked and felt like a book," he explains. "I thought how can I do that without making it look rigid and dull? So, I have to admit that I created something totally cheesy. I really don't condone this use of Flash in any way but I decided to create a realistic page turn. I went back to the math. When I really thought about it I realised that when you turn a page you're really just creating a series of triangles. Once I had that down, it was just a case of sorting out the equations."

Next he showed pieces that he'd done for Pontiac, a piece called Pattern Reflections, and something that he'd done a while ago which showed Josh Davis' head being manipulated. All viewable from his site.

Le Ciel Est Bleu
http://www.lecielestbleu.com/

"We don't build games we build toys," says Jean-Jacques Birge, interactive music designer at Le Ciel Est Bleu. He, designer Kristine Malden and coder Frederic Durieu presented their latest work that transforms 2D images into living, moving interactive online playthings.

Firstly they showed how they had built a puppet and made it move to the sound of a whistle into the computer's microphone. Then they showed how they then worked on that idea to create a scene where giraffes trip-trapped onto the screen and could be manipulated and dragged around with the mouse.

"After a trip to Kenya I had a wonderful photo of giraffes that I had taken. I wanted to make it move and used the code I had developed in the puppet sequence to do this. The animals are broken up into pieces and therefore you are able to move their limbs around to create some interesting shapes." What results is a beautiful array of movement and shape. You could almost be watching a secret 'Giraffe dance' only performed by animals living far from civilisation - it really is soothing on the eye. And the ear - all the pieces feature music created specifically for the individual piece by Jean Jacques. All the work shown can be viewed on their website.

C404
http://www.c404.tv/

A weird one this. Being unsure of exactly what C404 were about it was an obvious choice to check them out. When we arrived three people were already on stage behind an assortment of equipment that ranged from notebooks to what looked scarily like a car battery. It was impossible to see what they were working with. However after a few technical hitches they were up and running and without a word to anyone they launched their set.

OWWW! I resisted the urge to put my fingers in my ears for fear that it was a bit rude. A barrage of what can only be described as noise attacked our ears. It sounded like... err let me see... a herd of dwarfs wearing metal armour, scuttling around inside metal pipes, banging metal drums. Yep that's it.

All three members of C404 seemed to be making the noise by clicking buttons, or writing on what looked like Wacom tablets. All nodded their heads to the beat and seemed well please with their creation. This went on for another 40 minutes and in that time most of the audience decamped to the safety of the bar. We stuck it out hoping there would be an explanation of what the heck was going on. I have to say I actually started to enjoy it - despite the guy next to me putting his head in his hands and the people next to him lighting a massive spliff and joining the mass exodus. Josh Davis certainly enjoyed it as he filmed the whole thing sitting about a metre from one of the biggest speakers - pure madness!

Finally the beat slowed and the noise stopped. Again without a word to anyone C404 packed up and left. It was like it never really happened. I still have no idea how they did it, or why. Someone behind me mumbled something about JAVA but no... really... I'd like to know.

Josh Davis, Jemma Gura & Shapeshifter
http://www.joshuadavis.com/
http://www.prate.com/2003/

Why work? Josh's words not mine. Why work indeed when you can get the computer to create your designs for you. Josh continues on his theme of 'random shapes' with his latest work, done in collaboration with Jemma Gura and Shapshifter. Jemma and Josh presented to a predictably packed auditorium.

The two or three minute animation showed patterns and shapes taken from Japanese and Korean prints scattered randomly across what looked like a brown, cream and yellow map of the world. Each time Josh pressed the spacebar a new arrangement of shapes would appear. Each time he got a different combination of shapes, therefore you would never have the same illustration twice. Why work? Get the PC to do it for you!

Josh explained how the animation was put together from concept to execution while a silent Jemma sat and smoked. Apparently they passed images back and forth over e-mail and each added their own designs. Colour palettes were exchanged by way of GIFs that were stripped of their colour and imported into Flash.

It was a cool animation to watch but maybe begs the question, has Josh gone too far with the 'random' thing? Is it time for something new and can you really claim ownership when you have no control over what you are creating? Interesting questions for anyone who lets the computer make the decisions. Get a copy of the presentation by mailing presentation@praystation.com

Random Media
http://www.randommedia.co.uk/

By far the best of the clutch of installations was the 3D flying experience created by Random Media.

Standing on a platform holding two coloured balls, users fly through a futuristic 3D world created in Maya. The balls are detected by web cams placed on the floor and the engine uses Director to calculate the co-ordinates on screen. This enables you to 'fly' through the landscape. Despite the fact that you look pretty damn stupid standing in front of a crowd of people holding out two juggling balls, the stand was packed everyday.

Media Temple
http://www.mediatemple.net

Global hosting specialists and OFFF partners Media Temple filled their slot with a demonstration of the kind of community applications that Flash Com can produce. They showed a tool that would enable you to register your interests and your global location and then use it to search for other people with similar interests or professional goals: Or even meet up with them at events like OFFF. They finished with a general call for net artists and digital creatives to get involved with Media Temple in developing an application with Flash Com. In exchange you will receive free hosting and server space. Get in touch with Media Temple for more details.

Lobo
http://www.lobo.cx/

Although I didn't actually go to this presentation it's worth a mention because those that did go were totally blown away by it. Lobo are a Brazilian agency producing motion graphics. They had put together a piece that reacts to the music they play live up on stage on guitars. One of the pieces they presented was titled Desire and can be viewed at their site.

Show Studio
http://www.showstudio.com/

Show Studio presented a lot of work that ranged from 3D pieces showing fashion models' heads spinning in a 3D environment to reinterpretations of existing fashion shoots. However there were two pieces that really stood out for me; a piece called Sleep and one called Angel.

Sleep is a 6-screen documentary fashion film. It shows models in high-fashion clothing asleep, while a webcam records their movements overnight. The final recordings are then speeded up and paused every now and again to create an overview of the night's activities. The result is a beautiful, conceptual, almost dance-like movement. The stills that appear every few seconds could almost be magazine fashion shoots themselves. The models take on a fairy-like quality that is magical. http://www.showstudio.com/live.html

The second piece, Angel, has been shown before and was a little more disturbing. Set to music by Bjork a mural of an angel's face is filmed from high above. As you watch the angel's face slowly appears, changes colour, seems to writhe, and then disappears. It is only later that you find out that the whole piece was created using maggots coloured with food dye. A vile revelation that strangely adds to the beauty of the piece. http://www.showstudio.com/play.html

Insertsilence
http://insertsilence.com/
http://www.presstube.com/
http://www.presstube.com/404/
http://www.pitaru.com/

I've never been to a festival where the person who stole the show didn't actually turn up! But this is what has happened at OFFF. Amit Pitaru, one half of Insertsilence, is the talking point of the show and he didn't even set foot in Barcelona!

That's not to say James Paterson, the other half on Insertsilence, didn't wow the audience with his presentation. He started off by showing an amazing piece of work that used a Bjork sound track and that featured his trademark sketches being manipulated, flowed, reflowed and scaled in a delicate floating and very fragile animation which was produced with a bespoke drawing tool. "I'm not going to learn guitar, he said, so I figured out a way to create something we could rock out to in our own way.

Next he showed a piece called Pope which, though he did it a while ago, is still amazing. Again the Paterson-style sketch animation. This time set to a track from alternative hip hop artists Buck 65 http://www.buck65.com/

Next up a piece for Diesel that featured a sound recording of James and his sister aged five or six years old. Then some work he did for NikeLab and a game he produced for Playstation 2 and the Third Place.

But the best was most certainly left until last - a new drawing tool that Amit had developed for James to enable him to create sketches in a 3D environment. It's built in Java and at first glance the drawing tool look a bit like Photoshop. He had it plugged into a Wacom tablet and with the pen he was drawing simple lines on screen. "All this looks pretty simple," he said. "But in my left hand is a rollerball and when I move it the lines I've created will rotate in a 3D drawing space." With that the whole thing rotated and he showed how he could spin all around the line he had just created.

"That's not all," he continued. "Amit thought it would be cool to be able to tilt your 3D drawing just by moving your wrist a little. So he stripped out the drivers from the Wacom tablet and rebuilt them to enable you to do that." Excuse me...? Just stripped out the drivers…? He continued, "So now you can see I can draw, spin and tilt the drawing all at the same time."

Who is my superhero? erm... Amit Pitaru.