Vlad mastery

In class recently, we have had chance to try the vladmasters. In their own little world, they were sweet.

First, what I liked. I really liked the narration that the cd's had; it really gave a personalized vioce for the project. The music fit as well as the vioces with the story. The disks were personalized just as much as the vioce was. They had cool designs and were really awsome by just being put together by hand and idividually. The experience that we had was all on its own also. The 3d images were nice to look at as well as a change from the 2d perspective that films usually create. The timing of the clicks we had to do was crucial and well set up for the narration, expectially with the last set of disks, the music and slide changing were beautifully in sync.

The viewmasters were fun to play with, because either which way you held it, the show was still going on. The viewer was really the master of his/her own destiny because we had the choice wheter to move on or to stay behind; watch the clips while looking up or down, and at our own pace, backwards or fowards.

Some things were just a pain while doing this art. While thinking about what other media this could be offered in, I thought up of a vladmaster type show, but with only one disk. The changing of the disks was really cumbersome, and brought me out of the world i was viewing. Though intentional or not, the pauses between disks brought me back into reality and had me remeber that I was viewing a show. I would like to see a show were one disk is used and the narration and click speed is the key to express the story. Another thing about the viewmasters is how my arm cramped up while holding the device, the disk changing helped, but four shows in a row hurt a little.

At home over the weekend, so far, I played with binoculars while watching T.V. This was really cool, minus the head-ache, because I focused in on the action where I wanted it to be. The whole screen didnt fit in the binocular view so I could pan where I wanted too. This was another great medium for watching a story just like the vladmasters, but it kinda hurt my head after a while, my eyes were in pain too.

The level of interactivity was fun and more exciting than some of the work we have seen so far. Interactivity is becoming a bigger issue these days than it seem to be previously; not only in art but technologically. For example the Nintendo Wii. This uses a remote type controller where the player can point and move with sensors in the remote and out. This brings a new level of gaming as well as being able to be the first to use movement as a key factor in gameplay, you can really get tired of playing the Wii.