Richard Willis

On Thursday 27th of November - two days ago - a handful of other FlashBrighton members and I were at the DiMAs awards in Hove’s All Saints Church. In a previous blogpost I said, amongst other things, that FlashBrighton was a shoe-in for the “Strongest Community” award at the DiMAs. I really felt that it was a done-deal, not because of any weakness on the part of the opposition, but because of all the great things we’ve achieved.

And I was right, WE WON !!! It’s fantastic but I’m not going to say too much about it because Matt Pearson’s has already a great job of that here. Instead let me say this:

I was REALLY, REALLY pleased to see Matt Pearson pick the ‘Best Blog’ award for his zenbullets blog. I really admire good writing and zenbullets certainly has that. The delivery and content are excellent, and his documentation of the victimisation Sussex Police have only-just ceased to put him through is just captivating. For these reasons I also felt that Matt would be a shoe-in in his category, and was pleased to see that I was right again.

Obviously I had a hand in the FlashBrighton award but what might not be so obvious is that I also had a hand in a second award. Blast Theory were nominated in the “Digital Collaberation” category. Now, I thought that it was Blast Theory as a whole that was nominated but it turned out that it was specifically their ‘Rider Spoke’ project. In the words of Blast Theory, ‘Rider Spoke is a work for cyclists combining theatre with game play and state of the art technology’. Part of the work was a Flash front-end for a console cyclists had attached to the handlebars of their bikes (you can see some images of that in action here). Twas I wot made that Flash front-end.

And ‘Rider Spoke’ won too !!! So as Flash coder and copywriter, I came away from the night feeling like I had an important hand in not-one-but-two awards! I also came away from the night feeling quite drunk.

Finally, I would like to mention that Brightonian Flash agencies LittleLoud & Kerb, freelancer Sarah Bird and my former employer DigitalBrain were also nominated in other categories but sadly failed to pick up awards. FlashBrighton members were nominated in so many categories that it was inevitable that some of us weren’t going to get our just desserts. And anyway, LittleLoud are up for a BAFTA this weekend, so things aren’t really too bad for them. Maybe next year guys?

Spurred on by this page on Kristen Akermans’s site and this blog post on Matt Pearson’s blog - which both list freelancers available in Brighton and which both link kindly to me - I decided I should return the favour. So what follows is a list of those people I recommend if you’re looking for a freelancer. Obviously I top my own list - I’ll be wanting the work first, thank you :) - but if I’m busy I thorougly recommend the other guys and gals (listed alphabetically) here:

Designers

Charis Mystakidou: wiredportfolio.com
Kristen Akerman: sting.co.uk
Luke Hornsby: flamingpixels.co.uk
Tim Frost: bullandgate.com

Developers

Richard Willis: richtextformat.co.uk
Matt Pearson: actionscripter.co.uk
Matt Sayers: soplausable.com
Neil Manuell: revisual.co.uk
Nikos Chagialas: devgallery.com
Owen Bennett: steamboy.co.uk

This turns out to be outrageously simple. If you wanna create a grayscale somewhere between pure black and pure white all you need is this could-not-be-simpler equation:

var num:int = 1; // any int from 0 to 255
var grayscale:int = num * 65793;

All you need to ensure is that the value of ‘num’ is an integer from 0 (for pure black) to 255 (for pure white) and that’s it!

The shortlist for the ‘Digital Media Awards‘ - or ‘DIMAs’, formerly the ‘Brighton Web Awards’ - has just been announced and FlashBrighton members feature throughout. Matt Pearson for his excellent zenbullets blog in the ‘Best Blog’ catagory, Iestyn Lloyd (of LittleLoud) for ‘Best Use of Animation’ & ‘Outstanding Digital Design’, Alistair Macdonald (of Kerb) for ‘Best Use of Animation’ & ‘Digital Marketing’, Sarah Bird for ‘Farm Freelancer of the Year’, and FlashBrighton itself for ‘Strongest Community’. Judging by the sheer amount of FlashBrightonians listed, we must be a shoe-in for the latter award. Is that tempting fate, should I keep quiet? Nonsense, fate be damned; we’re on the list through merit alone! Or, should I say, we’re on the list because of all the awesome copywriting I’ve done for us this past year!

It’s unseemly to pimp yourself, right; very un-British? The truth is that I don’t care; I think I do a damn good job with the copy and obviously the judges think so too. But… ok, sure, I guess I have to admit that there are other things that make FlashBrighton great too:

1. That we manage to put on a presentation every single week;
2. That our membership are committed and interested enough to actually make a presentation every 7 days a viable option;
3. That as well as literally hundreds of enthusiasts, professionals and students, our membership also includes such luminaries as Niqui Merret, Tom Kennett & Chris Sperry, Iestyn Lloyd, Aral Balkan and of course Seb Lee-Delisle himself;
4. That we get the best speakers to talk: Richard Lord, Nick Weldin, Bob Swain, Kyle Jennings, Peter Passaro, Serge Jespers, Nick Tandavanitj, plus loads & loads more;
5. That, to paraphrase FB member Neil Manuell, we go from ‘the esoteric to the nerdy‘ with enviable ease;
6. That we put on awesome large events like our ‘Film Carnivals O Fun‘ and the ‘Big Day Out‘;
7. That we give away acres and acres of great blag, such as the free boxed copy of ‘FlexBuilder2′ every attendee at the ‘Big Day Out’ picked up;
8. And that we do it ALL for free, just because we want to;

When you look at it like that, maybe it’s no wonder that we made the shortlist. Here’s wishing LittleLoud, Kerb, Matt Pearson, Sarah Bird and FlashBrighton the best of luck on the 27th of November. I’m also backing the other clients I’ve worked with over the past few years too: my friends Matt, Ju & Nick at Blast Theory and my old employer DigitalBrain, who’s ‘DB Primary‘ portal is nominated in the ‘Best in E-Learning’ category.

I’ll be there on the 27th backing all these guys. And yes, I know its hardly the Oscars… but I don’t care, it’s a bit of fun!

Good luck one-and-all!

Sitting at the back of Grant Skinner’s session at ‘Flash on the Beach’ a few weeks ago i got my cellular automata classes out and did another visualisation with them. It’s really nice that they’re so easy to use, I can bash something like this out with in just a couple of hours. Again, just click the wee arrow to get going:

OK, not the most astonishing work, it would really be nice to push the envelope a bit further with it. Putting autonomous objects in a controlled environment is obviously going to be a rich vein for software, visualisations, experiments and games for the foreseeable future and I’m currently wondering quite how we can use that stuff in interesting new ways.

One of the projects I worked upon over the summer was destined for the South-American market and therefore needed to display in both Spanish and Portuguese. It was a microsite built in Flex and needed the capacity to alternate between these two languages at any given time. From the user’s perspective, a single button click should be sufficient to translate the entire site’s text from one language to another instantly. Looking around the web I couldn’t find any answers so I sat down and worked out a solution myself.

Here’s a sample app using English and my second language Swedish:

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