Sep 20 2002
Photoshop World Day 1
I’m at PhotoshopWorld as we speak and am providing full coverage. I’ve taken pictures, and written up what’s going on. Click read more and catch up on the hottest tech expo!
Here are the first day pics
Thursday morning was filled by pre-conference sessions (if you paid for them
when you signed up). I went to Ben Willmore’s Advanced Photoshop course, but
there were three other courses. Pre-con lasted from 9am until 1pm, long enough
to learn lots. Ben showed lots of neat tricks, and they were all covered in the
work book so you could relax and watch him instead of scribbling down notes.
The show floor was open after pre-con was done, and it was jam packed. Wacom
has a huge booth chocked full of 26 computers (half LCD iMacs) for an interactive
theatre. Apple has an Airport hub serving out broadband to most of the show
floor, which is a major plus.
At 5:30 the Keynote started. Everything went dark and a spoof of VH1′s Behind
The Music titled, Behind The Pixels. This hilarious spoof was
about PhotoshopWorld’s band, Big Electric Cat. The band was made up of
NAPP staff (even Scott and his wife Kalebra). Each had a part on Behind
The Pixels and it even had the band manager Jim Workman
and a few other NAPP staff members. Some of the more memorable lines are:
"Sure I was doing actions, everyone was, we were just kids"
"They were doing plug-ins right out in the open, it was horrible"
"They put Felix in Photoshop rehab, they only gave him 32mb of RAM"
"We knew it was getting out of control when people were throwing RAM
chips up on stage"
Hopefully Behind The Pixels will be posted some day (when it is I
will link to it).The voice overs sounded exactly like the moderator from Behind
The Music but it turns out it wasn’t him–just a great imposter. It
was a wonderfully done video, thanks to Ron Harlem.
Big Electric Cat rocked pretty hard for a group of Photoshop geeks. In times
long gone, Scott, Kalebra and Scotty all played in a band together. The Behind
The Pixels episode was littered with old pictures of them.
Next came the Jam Session where all the trainers get up and show their best
stuff in 5 minutes. Most instructors plugged their sessions pretty hard, but
that’s too be expected.
The Photoshop Hall of Fame was interesting and extremely well done. The voice
overs for the movie clips they showed were amazing. Adobe mad man Russell Brown
was inducted as well as two others.
After the Hall of Fame was finished Russell
came out for a presentation on the history of Photoshop. It consisted of goofy
props, and cheesy effects. The whole thing was done with printed out slides
placed on a table with a camera pointing on it. I’ve never seen a group of computer
people laugh so hard. It was great, and I nabbed several photos.
Look for more coverage tomorrow; I’ll be posting some mini-interviews of the
instructors, taking pictures of the show floor and more. Stay tuned!
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