Seb Lee-Delisle

I’m really pleased to say that we have Branden Hall speaking at FlashBrighton tomorrow night (March 23rd 2010) about Hype. Hype is Branden and Joshua Davis‘ love child (now there’s a scary thought!) and I’m really excited about it.

Josh was inspired by the way Flash made it easy to hack around with script and make some cool things happens – but sadly AS3 is far more complex and can alienate creative types. Hype gets rid of that complexity and gives you an accessible way to get started with generative art and code based animation.

But what if you’re not in Brighton? Well thanks to Influxis, we now stream all our meetings at live.flashbrighton.org. So come join us tomorrow!

EET : 9.30pm
GMT : 7.30pm
EST : 3.30pm
PST : 12.30pm

And coming up later in the year… Andre Michelle, Mario Klingemann, and many more!

I’m delighted and surprised that my local user group, FlashBrighton, won the award for Strongest Digital Community at the DIMA:s on Thursday night! We’ve been going for roughly three years and I manage the group along with Jo Summers, Richard Willis, and the rest of the team.

There are over 200 Flash developers and designers on the mailing list, all local, and we meet every Tuesday at the Werks.

We also run special events like last year’s day long conference Big Day Out and our twice yearly Big Screen Bonanza film nights. The next one is on the 9th of December so it’s really worth coming along if you’re anywhere near us! Sign up here : http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1367599

And my fellow Plug-in Media boffins were there in force to set up the glow stick voting system. Video and more details to follow!

[UPDATE] of course what I forgot to mention are the individual FlashBrighton members that also did well at the awards. More information on Matt and Richard’s blogs. As Richard says, we were all over the DiMA:S “like a rash” We had 3 winners and overall 7 projects that our members’ were involved in were shortlisted.

… and you should get the Flash equivalent of Hamlet.

Well that’s the theory at least. However we only had seven coders and seven laptops, so we ended up with seven different types of crap.

At tonight’s FlashBrighton session we had a Flash Pass-the-Parcel, where we all got 5 minutes on each computer before shuffling along onto the next computer.

It’s quite an alarming experience, to be confronted with a timeline of code, you have no idea what the person before you was attempting, whether it’s working and how to improve it. But it was also bloody good fun, and nice for once having no criteria to work towards.

Due to the nature of Flash the work tended to be quite generative-art-like, and some of it really was dreadful. But somehow we managed to craft this little nugget out of the chaos.

And Aral crashed as well to talk to us about his Head conference :

And here’s the source code if you’re interested, including all the crap we left in It should just work on the timeline if you paste it in.
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Let’s face it, 2007 was pretty spectacular, in fact it was SO spectacular that it’s taken me most of January to write it all down…

We flew straight into ’07 with a massive 9 level platform game, called Extreme Pamplona. It was so big, it took 15 people 2 months to make it, we even had to move into new offices to accommodate everyone!

Then we found out that we had come best in class in 3 separate IMA awards for the Plug-in Media website.

In February I re-launched our local Flash user group as FlashBrighton and we rather insanely increased our meetings to one a week!

In April, we were nominated for a Webby!

A trip for Boston for myself and Plug-in’s Creative Director Dominic Minns followed in May. We were invited to the New England Institute of Art to explain to an enthusiastic group of people exactly how we make games.
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Last night was dSCAPE’s designers’ night, this year taken over entirely by Flash bandits! The event was sold out with around 200 attendees, and I was co-presenter along with Tara Solesbury from Wired Sussex. As self-appointed Flash ambassador of Brighton, it was great to catch up with all the local Flash companies and see their latest work. All the presenters had amazing work to show off, and it’s no real surprise that I’m friends with pretty much all of them. I am after all the Flash slut of Sussex

I opened the evening, with a first look at the new Plug-in Media site, now up for public beta testing. Closely followed by FlashCodersBrighton mascot, Jerome presenting StudioTonne‘s cool sound toys.

Another FlashCodersBrighton member James Ellis Marsden (FuturLab) demoed their new Flash game Prism, which is looking pretty smart. (although I still haven’t quite worked out how to play it… ) We also had animators John Davidson of Blunt74 and Richard Mitchelson: both animators working in the broadcast arena. It’s really interesting to see how Flash is used to produce animated TV shows.

LittleLoud, another company we work with regularly, showed off some beautiful new interactive work. They prove that you can achieve really high quality cinematographical (is that a word?) style with Flash.

And last but by no means least, Kerb showed some outstanding animation and games. I worked with Kerb a few years ago, and it’s great to see that they’re still producing some of the best Flash work in the industry. Plus it was good to catch up with ex co-workers Zeb and Dylan, a pair of the finest illustrator/animators in our field.

And just when you thought that was more than enough excitement for one night, there was even a raffle for Adobe software and highly coveted Flash on the Beach tickets.

I’d like to say a massive thank you to Tara, Nick and the rest of the team at Wired Sussex for making this event such a huge success, and particularly for giving the Brighton Flash community a chance to show their wares.

One of our very own FlashCodersBrighton members has just posted an extremely useful FAMES installation guide.

Check it out here.

FAMES is an completely open-source solution to building Flash swf files, based around the ubiquitous Eclipse IDE. Was it Aral who came up with that acronym?