As attending FITC in Toronto for the first time last year was a life changing experience, this year I bought my super early bird ticket, in hopes of another great event. And it was. In fact, in the past year I feel that I’ve advanced pretty far in terms of knowledge related to the industry (a lot of it thanks to Matt Wright from Rokkan, Adam Barnum, and Jason Arena as well as my other professors from RIT New Media), and I’ve had a lot of enlightenment from the websites of many of the speakers that were present at FITC; it made each and every presentation that I went to all the more valuable.

This year, the amount of RIT New Media students that attended the event has almost doubled, and so we definitely didn’t get as lost in the crowd - in fact, we were the crowd! (at many of the sponsored parties, at the least! ) It’s good to see more of the underclassmen there at the event, taking advantage of both the student pricing and the close distance that Toronto is to our school. I’m sure a majority of them enjoyed the event and were inspired by the speakers.

On Sketchnotes: In my last post, I had written about Mike Rohde’s inspirational sketchnotes from sxsw. Sketchnotes are hard. Whilst sitting at Jason ‘JTed’ Theodore’s creative presentation, How To B.S.(BrainStorm) Better, I attempted to take sketchnotes, but I found that often JTed was speaking too quickly for me to actually take notes neatly. I ended up re-sketchnoting the notes from his presentation, which ended with the result below:

Next time I’ll probably have a regular pad to jot down my notes, and rewrite/sketchnote them after the presentations. I also noticed that, at the more technical lectures, there were less to actually sketch out, hence the two liner at the end that simply was a url to Colin Moock’s lectures (the url’s actually moock.org, and not his full name colinmoock.org).

Some of the other notable Presentations I attended were:
Si Scott - Challenging Imagination
Mike Downey - Adobe Keynote
Erik Natzke - Beyond the Knowledge: TheArt of Playing
Mario Klingemann - The Pixel Whisperer
GMUNK - GMUNKICKDOWN 08
Ralph Hauwert - Flash 2D & 3D Effects
Scott Hansen - ISO50:Blending Analogue & Digtial
Ryan Honey & Orion Tait - How Buck Goes ABout Making Commercials & Stuff
David Eriksson - North Kingdom - An Inside View
Jarnes Eberhardt - 2D Barcodes for Mobile Devices
Brett Forsyth - Building Multi-Touch Interfaces with Flash
Grant Skinner - My Favourite Things

Unfortunately, I missed the last three presentations, but I had hoped to watch/listen to Group 94, The Ronin & Dstrukt, and Robert Hodgin. All of the presentations I was able to attend, though, were really informational and I enjoyed them a lot. Overall this year I think it was definitely better than last, I’m really looking forward to going to FITC and other conferences like that in the future!

thanks for the linkups!:
jted!
jonezy