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

A few weeks ago I had been surfing the net and found an inspirational drawing that was just drawn in a moleskine notebook ~ it was then that I impulsively ordered some moleskine sketchbooks off ebay (for cheap!) in hopes of finding new ways to being creative and inspiring myself. I received them in about a week but I’ve been busy working on new media team project stuff and enjoying this rare sunny Rochester weather, so I haven’t opened them or looked at the stack of moleskines sitting on the corner of my desk. This morning, while surfing WeHeartIt, I came upon Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes(pictured above) from the SXSWi 2008 conference. I found them really inspirational, so I think I’m going to start keeping some sketchnotes, and I’ll probably have a moleskine in hand while at FITC! We’ll see how my sketchnotes come out! If you’re reading this post, Mike, thanks for scanning & uploading your sketchnotes, and inspiring me!

I helped my classmate and friend Keith Beltramini design and develop a website to display his 3D, Motion Graphics, and Animation work. His work is outstanding, so be sure to check him out!

After not having a new site in over a year, I finally got the time to finish up my new site - Jefflindesign Version 6 is now up and running! There’s also a new demo reel on there that I haven’t posted before, so make sure you check it out too!

Keith Beltramini, Matt Robinson, and I joined forces for Virtual Entertainment class to work on this project together. Originally we were going to tie in Flash Media Server on this project and make a multiplayer game, but as I was the only developer on the team ( Keith made some awesome in-game graphics and animation and Matt designed a great user interface), developing the game and learning Flash Media Server at the same time proved to be a difficult task to accomplish within the 5-6 or so weeks that we were alotted to this project. Thus we were forced to simplify our project a little, and this is our product - a mini flash game that allows users to login, play, and save their best times. There’s a few things that need to be tweaked, but overall I’d say the project was a success; it’s a playable game and encourages return visits for users that are competitive (most gamers would be!). Check out Breakout!

I was looking for a shoutcast channel in my winamp shoutcast browser and I spotted a sunsilk banner, and out of curiousity, I clicked on it to see where it would take me. Lo and behold, it took me to Sunsilk.us and on it was the site that I helped Rokkan work on! Rokkan picked me up in late December and had me develop the shell as well as the front page; and I worked on it until sometime towards the end of January. The most time consuming part of it all was exporting all the graphical assets out of photoshop and into flash, especially because this site was so image heavy. It’s pretty cool to see stuff that I’ve worked on up on the net, and it’s always a pleasure working with the folks at Rokkan!

Also, check out Rachel Diesel’s new website, just released this past weekend.

I’ve been working on my new site, but it’s not done yet, look for it soon!