Well I’ve just got back from the Flash On The Beach conference & feeling incredibly inspired! The conference guest speakers were amazing - & really opened my eyes up to the advances in the Flash world. I was very lucky to be given a ticket to this year’s festival through coming 1st in a competition to design a Flash banner to advertise the conference - so a big thanks to the Flash Brighton group and John Davey for making it all possible.

I’m off now to download a copy of the Papervison3D Collada Maya converter software to see what amazing 3D models I can drag into Flash!

And the best news of all - the next version of Flash is incorporating Inverse Kinematics! Now why they couldn’t include that technology into Flash years ago, I’ll never know! IK has been around in the world of 3D for donkeys years & revolutionised the way us 3D animators work. But it’s great news anyway for any Flash animator!

Out of all of the guest speakers, three stand out as being very inspirational to me:-

Chris Orwig - freelance interactive designer, photographer & lecturer at Brookes Institute of Photography. Chris gave an hour long talk on story, branding and visual design. A few things I took away from his talk are to keep things simple, how to explain my niche work in one sentence and how my work could tell a story (colour conveys emotion, typography a voice etc) & also complete admiration for his photography work.

GMUNK - an amazing Motion Graphics designer who combines Maya dynamics & modelling and design to create brilliant visuals. And very often his work has been produced to an extremely tight deadline - so I’m sure his tips and tricks will come in handy!

The Ronin - again, an amazing Motion Graphics designer & UK based! I recognised one of The Ronin’s animations “Black Day to Freedom” from the McLaren Award at Edinburgh Festival a few years ago - second time round watching it, I still found it incredibly moving. The Ronin combines photography and illustrations by his brother to make some very inspirational pieces. I would definitely like to try out some of his techniques to combine my photography work and get some motion into it!

As soon as the tickets become available for the 2008 Flash on the Beach - I’ll be getting my credit card out to book a bunch of tickets!