Flash in TO v65 was on last night, it was my first Flash in TO event and I knew almost nobody there. The event was at Element 156, which is on Augusta St, near Dundas. It’s a pretty neat environment with the front of the store setup as a shop/bar and the
back of the being used as an art gallery. For the event the basement was setup with chairs and a projector.

I don’t know if its typical but the FITO ( Flash in TO ) team had an awesome lined up of sponsors, including free beer from Adobe and free food from Manpower. They also had bunch of swag to give away including T-shirts, Yoyos and mini-Oreilly books on Adobe
AIR. As someone that’s organized a few events and tried to reach out for sponsors they did an awesome job.

The presentations consisted of Pecha Kucha style presentations which are very similar to the Ignite style presentations that they’ve tried a DemoCamp. I’ve already expressed my disappointment with this style of presentation and lack of pace control by the presenter. I don’t really feel it ads any value to audience except to lower the quality of the presentation and create a awkwardness. I did like that the FITO ( Flash in TO ) team was pretty laid back and didn’t hard enforce the slide time limits, just overall presentation time limit. They also had a audience facing clock with slide countered which used the audience to enforce pace on the presenter instead of a hard time per slide time limit.

I could only stay till the break so I missed about half the presentations. Of the presentations I saw I really liked Allan Estabillo presentation and the focus presentation by
someone who’s name I cannot remember.

Allen’s presentation was based on the idea that you could an abstract source, in his case climate change information, and create art something from it. He showed how the climate change data could be developed into various different images.

I thought the focus presentation was kinda cool in that as non-designer I rarely think about using out of focus effects and motion blurs. The presentation showed a variety of different out of focus effects and how they could be used.

I was disappointed I didn’t get to see Ryan Creighton’s presentation which was on in the second half.

Overall a great event and I’d definitely like to check it out again.