Multimedia Critique

URL: http://vimeo.com/16285298

It is an art work rather than a photojournalistic one; but I do think it is amazing because it answers a question of mine: why a photography / video technique, such as slow shutter speed or slow motion, is used in a certain project? Because the technique helps to present the theme, not because the photographer wants to show that he / she is able to use that technique.

The content of this multimedia is extremely simple; but I guess what the producer intends to do is just making you sit down and stare at the model's hair flying in air for two minutes, without thinking anything else. We see plenty of female who have long hair, do not usually see women's hair flying in such a slow and graceful way; so the multimedia actually creates an atmosphere in which we begin to pay attention to a kind of beauty that is often ignored by us in daily life. When we concentrate on it, we can feel the beauty. In this sense, I appreciate the technique of slow motion in this multimedia; because of the limitation of human eyes, we are not able to see slow motion with bare eyes, but camera helps. The slow motion technique is used to give us the feeling "I have never seen such things; and I never knew women hair could be so beautiful". If it is a picture which freezes the moment of hair flying, there will be no such miracle because we have seen a lot of similar moments.

Interactivity is one reason why I personally like vimeo. This project, similar with other vimeo videos, allows viewer to have control on many things such as progress, volume and size, and sharing to others. In the multimedia window, the viewer’s control buttons appear only when mouse move within the window (when under full screen mode, only when the mouse moves). Viewer can control the progress, pause or play, decide volume, switch to full screen or switch back, or even watch it again when it ends, all within one click. There is no navigation bar as we did in class; but it is not hard to go back to vimeo homepage, or go to the multimedia producer's vimeo page, or go to watch more multimedia from the same producer.

When watching the multimedia (or when finish watching), viewer can easily find the buttons for him/ her to "Like" the video, share it with other people, or embed it to other sites. Leaving comments is also easy and quick. Beyond this, the page even gives detailed information of how many people have viewed this multimedia in a certain period and how many of them like it; who have liked this project and who are they (with their Vimeo links in a sidebar of the page). If interested in this topic, viewer can find more relevant projects through several ways that are all easy enough: there are links to other projects done by the same producer just beside the multimedia window; the project has tags that enable viewer to find other projects relevant to this topic; viewer can also possibly find similar contents by visiting the pages of people who also like this project, or by visiting related collection. In this sense, Vimeo users are given more freedom and bigger space to find what they like to watch.

For the layout, personally I do not really like it because there are too many things in the page and the multimedia window is made too small. I would put the "More video from this producer" sidebar under the multimedia window to give more room for the video. If not, at least there should not be so big space of comments -- it may be better if only ten or twenty comments are shown in one page. Also, personally I wish the background color was black, not white.

The quality is satisfying; images are really high quality and audio is fine as well. The loading speed is fast. I tried both HTML5 player and Flash player but I did not notice any difference.