October was a month packed with design (this past week also being National Design Week — who comes up with this stuff anyway?). Adobe Max was easily the largest of these events. Some others include Mini Max (a mini version of Adobe Max). A documentary screening of Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight at Space15Twenty. A week long celebration of the 35th Anniversary of Hello Kitty at Royal/T. And LACMA’s From the Spoon to the City (where architects talk about their design process) — also next week.

Starting off the month though was FlashapaloozaStock IV, which set the stage for all the other events to live up to. It was a full day devoted to Flash, with a night of partying with like-minded people. The event, which has always been totally free, took place at Almer-Blank in Venice — the heart of Los Angeles’ Flash community.

The day began with a free breakfast, reward for all those who got to the event early (myself not one of them). Throughout the day free refreshments were provided. As expected, it consisted of a somewhat light fare: bagels with a variety of flavored cream cheeses, orange juice, coffee and fruit. This was great — except around lunchtime. (My suggestion would be to have a food truck show up around lunch. That way no one has to leave the event to get lunch.)

There were five presentations with about thirty minutes of sponsor and freelancer presentations in between with the first being by Mark Noland and Marcel de Jong from Autodesk. They explained how Autodesk’s 3D applications could be used to export flash animations resulting in a greater feeling of depth but without all the difficulties of trying to draw it all in 2D.

Matt Snow, a design manager for Adobe, talked about a field that’s currently growing — using Flash to create rich applications/ interfaces for set-top boxes and Blu-ray players that are connected to the television.

Chuck Freedman’s demonstration of how one could create fun audio-centric Flash applications with Ribbit’s software, was quite an eye opener. Like Matt Snow’s talk about using Flash for set-top box interfaces, it was just something I had never thought about.

(L to R) Joshua Hirsch of Big Spaceship, Mark Noland of Autodesk,and Joshua Davis.

My favorite lectures, beyond a doubt, were the last two of the day. The first, by Joshua Hirsch, from the award-winning New York agency, Big Spaceship, showed examples of the design houses’ amazing work, going into detail on the process behind certain pieces. What was clear was their love of using ‘analog’ (smoke machines, tanks of water, sand and paper) rather than digital to create their look.

The most entertaining speaker was Joshua Davis, a New York-based artist/designer who spoke about using Flash to create his fine art pieces. In my opinion he’s not just a talented artist but a rather skilled comedian. It was one of those LA heat wave days, with a crowd tired after a long day. So much so that even with Joshua Hirsch’s amazing display of work, trying to get a rise out of them was pretty difficult. But Joshua Davis was up to the challenge — animated and funny he soon had the crowd eating out of his hand.

By this time the crowd had grown considerably throughout the evening’s festivities. Once the last speaker’s presentation ended the first of the hourly raffles was held, with prizes including books from O’Reilly, Adobe CS 4 and tickets to Adobe Max.

The Martini bar by MTV opened up (damn, those drinks were strong) and the food had arrived. With a menu of hamburgers, hot dogs, pasta salad as well as potato salad and more, the after-party sponsored by Influxis was just beginning.

(L to R) Leigh Acosta, Malaika Millions.

With a name like FlashapaloozaStock you’d expect some light-hearted fun, and the evening’s performers provided just that. Starting off with some exquisite pole dancing by Leigh Acosta, the entertainment then moved on to Burlesque dancer,Malaika Millions‘ hilarious routine. She had the audience throwing tennis balls at her skimpy outfit with Velcro over each breast — if the ball stuck they won a prize. Or the audience had to do the Limbo with her legs as the Limbo pole.

The Pole Dancer

Limbo!

Magician Christopher Wonder came out in decidedly Steampunk-ish attire and proceeded to wow the crowd with some sleight of hand (comparatively easy considering everyone was pretty inebriated by then).

Finally as it got later the crowd started trickling away, leaving mostly volunteers in their red T-shirts who had worked all day to make the event happen.

This event is also basically FITC’s (Flash in the Can) Los Angeles event. Shawn Puckell of FITC tried doing the full conference in Los Angeles. That didn’t work and he now helps R. Blank to put on the much smaller FlashapaloozaStock event. It may be smaller but FlashapaloozaStock is still an amazing event. One that obviously took a lot of hard work to pull off and kudos to all involved in making it happen.

One of those involved, Almer/Blank (at whose space the monthly LA Flash meeting takes place) has regularly played host to the event. Although the Almer/Blank space is in a really nice location (on a quiet street at the end of the block) it’s really just one large room. And it struggled to do duty as conference room, exhibition space (with tables set up by the various sponsors), and socializing area where people could network all at once. The event also seems to be getting larger each year and may soon have to find a new space or drastically re-think how to use the existing one. That said the event was a most-interesting and fun-filled one and I can’t wait for next year’s event (though there are rumors that this one might have been the last).

via Sunil Rampersad, 25 October 2009 2:19pm | |