For previous Flash on the Beach posts in this series, see On the Beach (part 1), and On the Beach (part 2).

The afternoon session began with the ‘Jam Throwdown’. What on earth is this then? Well it’s quite simple: six very talented speakers from FOTB are given 10 minutes in which to lay down something sick that will amaze the audience. The speakers this year were: Grant Skinner, Mario Klingemann, Julian Dolce, André Michelle , Jer Thorp, Joa Ebert.

Grant Skinner is pretty well known amongst flash circles. Just a quick aside, Grant recently posted a list of what he feels are the basic skills a decent flash developer should have, quite interesting. Anyway, his 10 minutes involved demonstrating how building on some relatively simple animations and collision with some ball objects, some interesting audio visualization effect could be achieved. This culminated in quite a cool visualization for a Prodigy track.

I’ve already discussed Mario Klingemann’s morning session here, he used his ten minutes to continue his talk he didn’t manage to finish in the earlier session.

Julian Dolce used his time to show us how you can us ANT in Eclipse to publish several FLA’s in one go. There is more information on this here. Some of the reasons for wishing to achieve this for Julian was so his company could publish their projects from FDT, and also run automatic daily builds. You can also publish and test Flash CS3 Flp files.

Next up was André Michelle. André’s talk was probably the most exciting for me as he demonstrated some tools he had created to manipulate real time audio in Flash 10. These were very cool, in one example André showed us a Granular synthesis tool he had created, where he was able to draw lines and Bezier curves on a canvas which manipulated the sound in interesting ways in real time.

Andre Michelle

This was very impressive as although some of the other tools were interesting, they were doing relatively standard things like altering the filter cutoff and delay (for example) and were only novel this time as they were being done in Flash. The granular synthesis tool on the other hand really used the drawing ability of flash to do some cool audio manipulation effects in real time. The slides and tools are available here.

Here is a video of Andre demonstrating the granular synthesis tool:

Jer Thorpe demonstrated how by modeling in 2D and 3D and manipulating these models and views he was able to design an accessible playground for some actual work he had been commissioned to do. One of the focuses of the mix of 2D and 3D views was how they could generate suitable paths on gradients accessible for people in wheel chairs.

Lastly, and probably the most exciting Jam Throwdown was Joa Ebert high speed live coding performance. This was particularly entertaining as this was the first time I had ever seen anything like this. Joa used his ten minutes to live code a cool 3D visualizer for a Daft Punk song, in OpenGL and coded in Java. Joa built his visualizer in no less than 9 minutes and 40 seconds and the results were quite impressive. Here is a video of Joa in action:

Joa Ebert’s java live coding at Flash on the Beach 2009 from Thomas Gabrielsen on Vimeo.

As if that wasn’t enough, Joa really wowed the audience by showing is that his keyboard was completely devoid of glyphs! To be honest if he always works this way then he probably completely used to it, but was quite impressive all the same. I guess doing this is a good idea if you’re ever in James Bond – esque situations where you are forced to use a foreign letter keyboard…

Next FOTB post will discuss Jared Ficklin’s session on visualising sound in nature and code.