I was just scrolling through Moon Phase’s list of autumn anime and I came across Hanoka. The official site doesn’t have much information, but a single line in the promo video on the homepage caught my attention:

日本初！！
本格フラッシュテレビアニメーション
「HANOKA」

Translation:

Japan’s First!!
True Flash TV Animation
“HANOKA”

“Flash TV Animation”. I think the industry has just hit a new low. I can’t find more details anywhere on the site, but the animation in the promo video certainly looks like it was done in Flash. And it’s going to be aired on TV…

Which begs the question: Why the hell would anyone want to make an anime using Flash!? Anime are all made digitally anyway and I don’t see how using Flash can help lower the production cost. Are the creators aimming for the “new radical idea” angle? Or are they high on crack?

According to the biggest newspaper of Finland (7/10/06), Helsingin Sanomat, this infamous Loituma girl flash animation has sparked the band’s popularity once more. the song Ievan polkka has been downloaded worldwide hundreds of thousands of times and the band has got fan email from all over the world.

When asked about it, they were astonished. the singer who sings the most famous folk-scat solo part, Ms Autere said she thinks the comeback of Ievan polkka, a song originating in 1930’s and Loituma’s remake in 1995, is because of a flash animation showing a japanese anime girl waving the leek and singing Ievan polkka.

Now the band which had not been active in many years has got their own agent and they’ve been asked to tour in many countries, many of which outside Europe.

So for once 4chan did something good. :3 And here’s the movie if you haven’t seen it already.

Anyway, here’s a quick lowdown of the second day of Macromedia MAX 2005 Singapore. The speakers today were Jeremy Clark, Macromedia Flash Product Manager, Jared Tarbell of Levitated and Gallery of Computation, Mario Klingemann and Yugo Nakamura

Mr. Tarbell’s presentation on simulating organic behaviours using simple recursive object coding was very interesting. He programs on-screen objects to move according to preset rules with an inherent random factor and creates very artistic patterns with them. One of my favourite examples is the Lorenz Attractor.

Nakamura-san’s presentation is my personal favourite. The websites he designed are just on a completely different level from most Flash sites I’ve seen. Just take a look at some of his work, like Amaztype, Fotologue and Amana, and you’ll see what I mean. The new Japanese Xbox360 promotional site, Jump-in, was also created by him.

The rest of the presentations were meh.

I did manage to speak to Marcos Weskamp (my favourite speaker from yesterday) and ask him about studying in Tokyo. Apparently he choose Japan only because of a scholarship offered by the Japanese embassy. He went there without speaking a word of Japanese and took one year of preparation before actually attending lectures at university, where he was the only foreigner. Also, he only took JLPT up to level 2.

Trust me to ask about such things in the middle of a Macromedia conference.

I was most impressed with Mr. Weskamp’s work on using Flash to present complex data graphically. His Social Circles project uses circles and lines to represent activities within a mailing list, allowing you to very easily visualize who in replies to who and who talks the most. The Newsmap is also a very impressive program that generates a colour-coded table based on Google News feeds and resizes different cells according to the importance of the news topic. Thus, the user is able to compare how different countries (based on the selection available on Google News) place different importance on different types of news. The algorithm used to resize the cells is very advanced. His latest work, the Flickr Graph is also quite neat. His presentation was the only one that I really enjoyed. Oh yeah, he studied in Tokyo and is currently living in there.

The live demo of Macromedia Flex during the keynote speech was pretty intriguing too. The use of “states” instead of a timeline with keyframe makes it much better for application development. Damn, almost everything uses XML to parse data and provide API for 3rd party applications these days.

It appears that Macromedia is quite serious about making Flash an all-purpose tool for interactive applications and user interfaces…but I think they need to implement full 3D rendering support for that to happen. They are also pushing Flash Lite quite strongly but I’ve yet to see a fully working commercial Flash Lite application…even though my phone supports it.

One more day tomorrow…