FITC Toronto 2017
Off the beaten path from the main tracks of FITC Toronto, you’ll find The B-Side – a place to share personal war stories, brainstorm new ideas with the audience, and hear stories only found backstage. Unpredictable and off the record.
Defined by Defiance
This is a personal story of the journey to point B and how defiance became a driving force to stand back up after every knock down. The story is filled with a chaotic path of death, drugs, abuse, foster care, being abandoned by family and having to find places to stay just to finish high school. The story of defiance begins — the defiance to push forward, get back up after every knockdown, to not give up even in the darkest of…
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Hydro74
Hydro74
Fixing the Visual Web: Lessons From a Six Year Quest
As one of the first front end developers at YouTube, Chris noticed a problem. The way we serve images online was broken. We designed it for a web that was text-heavy, desk-bound and bandwidth-rich. But the web was changing. Visuals dominated, even as displays fragmented, mobile flourished and bandwidth-crunched wireless became many people’s primary connection.
The answers available no longer fit the real problems. So Chris founded a company to fix it — imgix. Fast forward six years later, imgix has…
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Chris Zacharias
imgix
Interactive Cinema + Film Project “A Man And A Woman”
This presentation will be about interactive storytelling and cinema, using the interactive film project “A Man and A Woman (abbrv. AMAAW)” by the presenter, Thierry Loa, as a case study.
AMAAW is an interactive psychological feature drama about two millennials — Paul and Virginia — in life transition, seeking their path between university and professional lives, while navigating the complexities of love, trust and youth. In the film, viewers make morally-based decisions for the protagonists.
Target Audience
Filmmakers, interactive designers, new media storytellers, cinema…
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Thierry Loa
HelloHello
Karma Chameleon: Design is Never About the Designer
As a digital problem solver, being a chameleon is the only way to build good karma into your work. Liam will discuss a dozen tangible ways to design and develop for others, create in the open, discard your ego and connect with your audience empathetically and effectively.
Objective
To teach designers / engineers the value and new processes of connecting and testing with users.
Target Audience
Any level of digital creator who is interested in solving problems for real people.…
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Liam Oscar Thurston
Loblaw Digital
Lightning in a Bottle: Hand-Drawn Animation in VR
Nick is an animator and VR developer. For him, the rise of 6DoF controllers–wands you can move in 3D space–is the most exciting development in VR. He created the Lightning Artist Toolkit so he could bring hand-drawn VR animation into mature 3D animation packages. LATK is a suite of tools for creating frame-by-frame, hand-drawn animation in VR, readable in any 3D graphics application and ready to use in real-world production scenarios:
The core of LATK is a common exchange file format…
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Nick Fox-Gieg
Nick Fox-Gieg Animation
Master of None
Refuse to believe there’s a limit to how much you can know. Understand what perpetually learning (new skills) can do for you without mentally drowning from the start. In this presentation Olaf will take you through his own experience of wanting to know it all, being told to “focus”, diving into the deep end of VFX & VR without a life jacket and what he’s learned along the way. So don’t be afraid: be excited.
Objective
To help you understand…
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Olaf Blomerus
B L M R S
MIDI is Staging a Comeback… in Your Browser!
If you own an electronic music instrument made in the last 3 decades, it most likely supports the MIDI protocol. What if we told you that it is now possible to interact with your beloved keytar, drum machine or MIDI software directly from your browser? You would go crazy, right? Well, prepare to do so…
With built-in support inside Chrome and Opera, upcoming support in Firefox and plugins for other platforms, this possibility is now a reality. This talk will introduce…
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Jean-Philippe Côté
TangibleJS
So I Decided to Program a Solar System Simulator
This is the story of how a Javascript experiment, a solar system simulation in the browser, became a t-shirt through a successful Kickstarter. It started as a pet project, which Martin thought was of little value beyond his own entertainment, and it turned into something that he had not envisioned.
Martin will describe what he went through to make this very unusual project. It involves a lot of different things from NASA’s open data, Three.js, Adobe Illustrator scripting, vector drawing…
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Martin Vézina
La Grange
TensorKart: Self-Driving MarioKart With TensorFlow
TensorKart is an end-to-end deep learning demonstration about training an AI to play MarioKart 64 with TensorFlow. Using the same technique as Google’s self-driving cars this talk will go through the process step by step and explain it in an approachable way. By the end of the session you’ll see an AI playing MarioKart 64 and understand how it works regardless of previous experience in deep learning or programming.
Objective
to bring deep learning to a wider audience in an…
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Kevin Hughes
Shopify
The Vinyl Server
Once upon a time not so long ago, all of our media were physical – a picture was printed on paper, a song was pressed into vinyl or encoded in changing magnetic domains on a piece of tape. These days, things have changed a lot. Pictures and songs and other digital media have a very different nature from their analog ancestors. They exist beyond space and time in a kind of digital heaven, and have more in common with Plato’s…
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Mark Rigley
Shopify
Tool Libraries, and How Humans Share the Earth
The sharing economy is a way of accessing the things you do not need to own. Ownership, in the case of many of our physical products, is a burden, for one must buy, store, maintain, and secure those things, and then get rid of them at the end of their life-cycle. Usually someone just needs to put a hole in a wall, or paint a room. The same concept of tool libraries can extend to other things. Lawrence will demonstrate…
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Lawrence Alvarez
The Institute for a Resource-Based Economy
Using Big Data to Find Anomalies and Fight Crime
Many crimes are difficult to track down: human trafficking, fake parts, counterfeit medication. But traces exist: in ads, in posts, in shopping sites and on and on. Richard approached the problem as one related to advertising: in order to sell, someone has to be visible somewhere. He uses search indexes, big data, machine learning, language processing, and graph theory to facilitate search through this data and finally add an easy visualization-based interface to allow experts to connect the dots. Investigators have been…
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Richard Brath
Uncharted Software
