FlashForward Day 2 and 3

Carrying over from the last post, Thursday wrapped up with Lynda Weinman and Erik Natzke. Lynda talked about her views on education. A bit of a dry presentation – page after page of bullet points, few if any images and Lynda mostly just reading the points and elaborating a bit. But maybe I’m just bitter bacause after winning a rubber arrow, being a judge for a few FlashForward Film Festivals, and speaking at 4-5 of her conferences, when I met her just before she spoke, she was like, “Hi, have we met?” and showed no sign of recognition at all after I introduced myself – just like every other time I’ve met her. But whatever.

Erik Natzke wowed the crowd as usual. 🙂

Later in the evening was the Film Festival. That was fine. People seemed to be happy that it moved along quickly, as those things can be rough if dragged out. After grabbing some dinner I headed over to Ruby Skye for the official party of the night. Maybe it’s just because I’m becoming an old fogey, but those parties just don’t do anything for me these days. Music so loud you can’t hear a damn thing anyone says, and about three brave souls out on the dance floor. I left after a short while and tried to look for any other groups of people who might be heading to another bar or restaurant or whatever to just hang out and have some good conversation. But I failed in that and wound up going back to my room, trying to do some work and just falling asleep.

The speaker schedule got a bit mixed up for some reason on Friday, so I forget exactly who spoke when, but there were just a whole bunch of really great presentations. Hoss Gifford, Branden Hall, Luke Bayes, Paul Ortchanian, Stacey (my groupie) Mulcahey, and Scott McCloud were all very entertaining as well as very inspiring. I honestly enjoyed the hell out of all of their talks.

Ivan Todorov went quite a bit over his alotted 20 minutes, and there was an awkward moment where Beau stood up and told him he was done. Ivan said he had two more minutes to wrap up and Beau somewhat heavy-handedly gave him 30 seconds more. That was probably the low point of the conference.

Karen Kimsey-House is a personal life coach of some kind and gave a talk about reeeeeaaaaallly listening to each other, with our hearts, not our ears. Probably way too touchy-feely for this crowd. And she kept talking about her “anacronym” (I wanted to scream out “It’s ACRONYM!!!”) AIR : Authenticity – Intimacy – Respondability. I don’t think she had any idea that AIR stood for something else with us, so there was a bit of Disconnectability. There seemed to be some women in the audience who really responded to it, but most of the guys were rolling their eyes and trying not to laugh. Sorry, I’m kind of harsh, but that’s the way it was.

David Carson also spoke on Friday. I was like, yeah, sure, famous typographer/designer dude, whatever, yawn, probably all stuck up and arrogant. But this was one of my favorite sessions of the conference. I was laughing hysterically at some of his stories, and even he had to control himself, laughing at his own stories a few times. After the conference I saw him hanging out outside and had a nice conversation with him. Seems like he really enjoyed the conference himself, attending quite a few presentations, and although not understanding much of what was going on in terms of Flash, really enjoying the vibe of the whole thing. I’ve noticed that for the most part, famous speakers like that, particularly those not directly in the Flash field, tend to show up, give their talk, and disappear. The fact that he hung out for the entire conference was pretty cool. When I got home today, I looked for his book, The End of Print, in a couple book stores, but it’s out of print, so I ordered it from Amazon.

At the end of the day was the speaker slam, where anyone who wanted could get up and talk for two minutes about whatever they wanted to the whole audience. The undisputed mega-hit of this section was Matt Maxwell, the ActionScript song dude I blogged about the other week. He talked for a minute then sang one of his songs acappella for a minute. The audience ate it up and demanded an encore, which he did with the accompaniement of his iPhone held up to the mic.

And that was it for the conference. I wound up going out to eat with a bunch of old and new friends and then back to the Fairmont for a few drinks. It was the best evening of the whole time, but I had to cut it short to get to the airport for my flight home.

I’ll probably do another post on my overall reactions to the conference, and how others seem to have taken it as well.