Seb Lee-Delisle’s Wednesday morning session was a reflective talk on the notion of ‘Work/Play’. Seb began the session with a super fast fly through of some recent work from Plug in Media’s portfolio, complete with running commentary from Seb.
I WILL pay your parking ticket…
This session was very much a fun and experimental session, with some audience interaction. The first of these began with Seb rather oddly mentioning about a ‘missing girl’… and how Seb knows who she is but has never met her… This strange and cryptic intro was in fact just to do with a iwillpayyourparkingticket which displays daily tweets from people who have mentioned recieving a parking ticket, and how this may give them a little bit of shitty day. People can then visit the site and deal out a specific amount of love to the parking ticket victim, in an effort to make them feel a bit better. Whichever person gets dealt the most love through the duration the site was up, then gets their parking ticket paid for by Seb himself.
Obiously this then meant Seb attempting the contact the winner through Twitter, in this case one @jenwell about paying parking ticket! Naturally @jenwell assumed he was some sort of British nutcase as she had no idea who he was or why he wished to send $41, so his attempts to pay her ticket were sadly in vein. I can only imagine the sort of tweets he was sending, ‘@jenwell, Hi you don’t know me, but I need to know where you live so I can send you money for your parking ticket…’
So as Seb’s attempts were sadly unsuccessful, he enlisted the audience to do a mass tweeting session to poor, unsuspecting @jenwell, all imploring her to contact Seb as he wants to pay her parking ticket! So naturally, a buzz of tweeting began and we were able to see the tweets going up as it was happening. @Jenwell has since tweeted ‘@payyourticket @sebleedelisle!!!!!’ so I can only assume she has finally got wind of it. Brilliant experiment and demonstrated the sort of thing I have never imagined Twitter being used when simply using it on a day to day basis.
Glowsticks
The second audience interaction involved each member of the audience receiving a (miniature) glow-stick and the house lights being dimmed… The reason for this soon became apparent as the audience was asked to indulge in a game of 3D – glow stick controlled pong! Essentially, the situation was just that a camera and Seb’s flash were detecting which side of the room had the most ‘glow’, and then the paddle moving over to that side in an attempt to get the ball.

It’s the sort of thing which has been done before at this sort of thing but for me was a nice interlude to the other talks during the day, and Seb’s excellent and humorous presentation style made it all the more fun.
Big and Small
The final part of the talk was regarding Plug in Media’s superb Papervision3D site, ‘Big and Small’. The site was made for the titular childrens program showing on Cbeebies. Seb gave us a run through of the impressive mix of Papervision3D and movieclip animation in the site. Highlights including their own custom physics engine for various things and reflections in the bathroom mirror, which was the first commerical instance of this effect I have seen in a Papervision3D site. This eventually led on (after a glowstick audience vote) to Seb giving us a bit of sneak preview of Big and Small part 2, which takes the user out of the house and into the garden. Here, Plug in Media have obviously gone to town with more Papervision3D experiments, including a vegetable patch where you can grow your own vegetables, and impressive water ripple effects in the pond.

What I found most impressive about the site is the seamless intergration of 2D flash movieclips on the stage and how these fit into the 3D rendered Papervision world. I did a similar thing for a Christmas themed game for Callaway golf, which fused 2D flash movieclip animations into an Away3D rendered golf course. This was reasonable challenging and we only had one 3D scene and only a handful of animations to insert. The big and small site takes this idea and put it into a much larger scale, with compilcated animations of characters jumping round the 3D scenes, all without any graphical glitches. Add to this a vast array of sound effects, background music and reasonably quick load times and you have a very impressive 3D flash site. There is a full write up of the project here.
That wraps up the morning sessions. The next FOTB post will cover the famous ‘Jam Throwdown’ session, where six of the FOTB speakers gets just ten minutes each to throw down anything they wish.