I spent yesterday in Tønsberg where I attended to Animedia 2005, an animation festival arranged by Idefagskolen. A fair amount of people from the norwegian motion graphics and 3d design industry (if we can call it something like that) provided various talks. I've posted some pictures from the festival here.

Mikrofilm

Mikrofilm is a small production company targeted mostly against short films from 1996. The founders of Mikrofilm Kaija Næss and Lise Fearnley gave us a lecture in how they experiment a lot with various techniques and played a few of their short movies.

Inovani

Inovani stand behind a new technology that can create live interactive speech animation on a character based on simple text input. It's already a service out there called FaceMS which can be used to create a speech animation to your cell-phone. Quite cool :). Inovani presented their technology with a breathtaking demo on how they have created a system to minimize load on every component of the system from server down to the client sitting on a cell-phone or PDA. The main target now is entertainment services, but the technology should be well suited to be integrated in various learning applications. I had a small chat with Bjør Carlin, one of the inventors.

A few articles about Inovani and their technology (in Norwegian):

• NRK.no - Mobilanimasjonene kommer
• Teknisk Ukeblad - Mobilmoro

Caprino Studios

Two guys from Caprino Studios held a lesson on the aspects of motion capture (MOCAP) and how to use the best of motion capture data combined with traditional keying animation.

Gimpville

Einar Dunsæd, head of the small but successfull 3D studio Gimpville, had an informal chat with the audience on his experience with the industry after finished school at the same Idefagskolen two years ago and what the students could expect when they is finishing the school and is ready to hit their first job.

Filmkameratene (Elias - The Little Rescue Boat)

Espen Fyksen, director of the upcomming 3d animated TV series "Elias - The Little Rescue Boat", gave us a full overview of the project from ideas and planning, throught pre-production and promos to pipeline and a few pilot episodes to final product.

Here's how Elias looked before:

And here's how he looks now (on this image together with another character called "Sjark"):

The technical director on Elias showed a few of their pipeline tools:. Here with their reference system:

"Elias - The Little Rescue Boat" trailer can be downloaded here.

Qvisten Animation

Ove Heiborg and Rasmus A. Sivertsen from the established animation studio Qvisten Animation started their presentation with their latest music video "D:A:D - Scare Yourself". I got a bit scared actually ;) They presented a lot of commercials and animated shorts and told about the techniques that was used. A very good source of insperation. You should check out their impressive reference list.

Back in Oslo it's time to sum up the conference and post a few images :) The International PHP Conference 2005 Spring Edition was held at RAI Conference Center in Amsterdam. Here's a good image I got from the back of the center.

Day 1

It was pretty easy to find our way to the conference but I must say that I was a bit confused when I arrived and the first thing I saw was the "Ruby Lounge" ;)

But then I turned to the left and saw these guys fighting for cables to high-speed internet connection for some hacking and I was confident that I had come to the right place :)

On the first conference day I attended to Zeev Suraski's talk "PHP 5 - An Integration Platform". He gave an overview of WebServices and Java integration in PHP 5. Then I went over to Derick Rethans talk "Defending Against Users" which actually was a talk about his work on a SAPI Input Filter mechanism to create server-wide input filter rules. I didn't find this that interesting actually, but since I'm interesting in developing PHP extensions I got some things out of it.

After lunch it was time to listen to Stephan Schmidt's two talks. First "Go OO! - Real-life Design Patterns in PHP5" where he showed of the capabilities in terms of design patterns that now applies more and more to PHP application with the new object model in PHP5, the first half was an introduction to creational, structural and behavioral design patterns, and in the second half he gave quite a few practical examples. In the second talk "Component and Event Based Architectures" he went future on behavioral-patterns and his new upcomming framework patPortal. I was actually hoping for PRADO since that's what I like the most but he only mensioned it in a few slides.

The last technical talk on the first conference day that I attended to was the presentation of a school project by Nick Elprin and Lucas Strozek from Harvard University. They entertained us with a nice little application that did speech recognition in PHP.

The speech recognizer was implemented in C as a PHP extension but the interface with graphics was pure PHP. Quite impressive :)

After the conference ended we walked down town and had a nice dinner on one of Amsterdam's restaurants.

Day 2

I started the second conference day with Sebastian Bergmann's talk "PHPUnit - An Introduction to Unit Testing PHP Applications". I especially liked the new code coverage functionality he showed. But the most advanced functions doesn't seem to be in the 2.2 release of PHPUnit2 so I think we'll find more features in 2.3.

Since I'm into WebServices in PHP I also had to attend to John Coggeshall "Web Services in PHP 5".

Laura Thomson gave a good talk about how both normal php errors and the new exception mechanism applies to how error handling should be done in her talk "PHP 5 Error Handling" (sadly I couldn't find the link to her slides).

Next was Derick Rethans heroic talk "Dominating the world". He covered how his company eZ Systems did a new translation extension to handle a wide range of languages.

The very last talk at this conference I attended to was Stefan Neufeind's "Reports with PEAR::Image_Graph". PEAR::Image_Graph provides a wide range of plots and is quite advanced. A lot of good examples can be found on here.

Since I only attended to 1/3 of all the talks I'll try to link to the talks I didn't manage to listen to:

• Derick Rethans - "Playing Safe"
• Andrei Zmievski - "PHP and Unicode"
• Andrei Zmievski - "Say "Hello" to PHP-GTK 2"
• Tobias Schlitt - "News from PEAR"
• Sebastian Bergmann - "PHP 5 - The Year After"
• Ben Ramsey - "PHP-Based Frameworks"
• Ben Ramsey - "Web Security"

I'm enjoying lunch here in Amsterdam. I've already got my PEAR-pen and other IPC accessories so I'm geared for these two days :). The day started with an opening keynote by Software & Support Verlag GmbH hosting the conference. Afterwards we attended to "PHP5 - An intergration platform" by Zeev Suraski where he did go through some basic new features in PHP5. Then Derick Rethans showed us his latest work on an SAPI Input Filter in his talk "Defeding against users".

I just brought up the project page for my wsdl2php tool. You'll find the page here. I'll add more details after the conference.

My employer Telio was kind enough to allow two colleagues of me and I to attend to the International PHP Conference 2005. The main part of the conference is being held from May 3rd - 4th which we'll attend to.

There has also been published an official conference blog that will be updated throughout the conference.

Before I leave it seems like this will be the agenda for me:

Tuesday:

• 09:30 - 10:45: PHP5 - an Integration Platform
• 11:15 - 12:30: Defending against users
• 14:00 - 15:15: Real-life patterns in PHP5
• 15:45 - 17:00: Event-driven architectures
• 17:15 - 18:30: Speech Recognition in PHP

Wednesday:

• 08:00 - 09:15: Unit Tests with PHPUnit
• 09:45 - 11:00: Web Services in PHP 5
• 11:15 - 12:30: PHP5 Error Handling
• 14:00 - 15:15: Dynamic Duo: Flash & PHP
• 15:45 - 17:00: Ming: Generating Flash Movies

I can't wait to get some PEAR accessories :).