I’m rather new to giving talks and this year gave me a couple of occasions to practice.
here are most of the resources I’ve used & shown for the Processing & Haxe workshops.

PROCESSING

it all started with the Processing Cities, first in Paris then in Bordeaux, in both cases, it was a 3 hours workshop in Processing (obviously), the idea was mostly to review the basics.

it was a pretty interesting exercise for me, I don’t know if the attendees were satisfied, we didn’t have much time to discuss afterwards. it was very hard to evaluate the session also because the attendees had very different skills, backgrounds and expectations. this is precisely why the Processing community is interesting ; people are very transversal.

if you’re interested in the source code, here you go (or click on the image below)
here’s a map of the contents of the ZIP:

it’s rather self explicit apart maybe for the “and now…” which contains image manipulation and some 3d

I tried to push them on OpenProcessing, but it wouldn’t work… it should run properly on any version of Processing.
I didn’t credit all the people I took code from, but you can browse the Openprocessing.

if you’re interested in this kind of things, make sure to check Daniel Shiffman’s blog and his nature of code book’s site. he explains very well.
also Casey Reas shared a list of very interesting books : http://formandcode.com/bibliography
also, the authors of Generative Design released all the book’s examples here : http://www.openprocessing.org/user/18615

FMX 2013

then there was the almighty FMX13 in Stuttgart which was a real crash test for me, huge amount of stress as the other speakers are people whose work I venerate. the track was curated by Frank Reitberger, the stage was huge, we had a 12 m wide screen, everything was ready and then, the sun came out and lots of people preferred to rest in the grass rather than sit in a dark room.
In the end everything went fine (sort of), it was a great experience.

WORLDWIDE HAXE CONF

the most recent event I talked at was the WWX13, as mentionned in the previous article, I started using Haxe NME as an alternative to Flash. then I prepared a workshop with all kinds of animation principles mostly to get used to the language itself.

I ended up with a nice pile of samples that you’ll find here : Haxe NME samples
again here’s a snapshot of the folder structure:

ca = cellular automata from this article http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/218976/Generative-Art-Autonomy-Cellular-Automata by Matt Pearson
dna = dna study based on Daniel Shiffman’s examples
geometry = roughly the same as the processing zip above
particles is a step by step particle system which some “physics” constraints.
planets is the very first exercise I did with NME, inspired by this visual

the code is provided as such, and might just fail miserably but with some patience, one might get it to work with the latest version of Haxe.

so I had piled up a bunch of stuff in HAXE and when I heard about the conference, I thought it might be a good idea to give it a try.
the conference was great, rather confidential as compared to the FMX or the upcoming Reasons To Be creative but still.
I had a chance to attend sessions by some of the brightest people of the industry and hanging out with them was a real privilege.

Silex Labs who organized the gig (and some smaller haxe-centered events), recently released the videos of the speakers.

and this would be me:

the other sessions are available at the bottom of this page:
http://www.silexlabs.org/142737/the-blog/wwx2013-speech-nicolas-barradeau-aka-nicoptere-random-graphic-doodles/

if all of the talks are interesting, I’d recommend Nicolas Cannasse’s, Valérie Alloix and Joshua Granick’s sessions first.

oh and sorry for the rude words about DataVizualisation artists, some of them are ok and none of them deserve to be treated a motherfucker…

REASONS TO BE CREATIVE

in September I’ll be part of the Reasons To Be Creative festival.

I can’t express how proud and cheerful and stressed I am just thinking about it.
this is simply the best festival for people that create visuals with code.
the venues are awesome, the speakers are insanely talented and their sessions really make you a better coder/artist.

as far a my session is concerned, I try to improve all the time. having seen my Haxe session in video is a great help for that. so in september:
- I won’t pick subjects at random any longer ; it was a fun idea but it’s difficult to build a meaningful session
- I’ll keep only what I consider to be the most appealing demos & animation principles
- I’ll keep a procedural object evolving during the session, probably give it a more complex behaviour
- I’ll opensource the code and share the slides afterwards
- I’ll show a variety of animations rather than one big piece

anyway thanks for reading, thanks to those who invited me so far and I hope to see you in Brighton!

Tags: life, session