Feels like ages since anybody made a new shred DVD. Could it possibly be that the last one was Natural Born Kickers? In any case, Honza has just released The Art of the Game on DVD, and I had the chance to watch it a few times in the last couple days. When Ryan Thomas' Worlds 04 DVD came out, and later when Windsor's Natural Born Kickers was released, Dave Clavens and others wrote in-depth reviews of the DVDs which I thought were great. They let people know the good and bad aspects of the DVDs so they could make informed choices about what they'd buy, as well as what they could expect. It is in this tradition that I am writing a review of The Art of the Game. Please keep in mind that this review is just my opinion, but there are objective facts included as well. I hope this is of some use or interest to some people.I'll kick off this review by talking about (what I think are) the best parts of this DVD, then discuss what I thought could be better, then wrap it up with my overall impression.
______________________________________________________
The good stuff
Rare footage of good players you don't often see Personally, I think this is the biggest selling point of the DVD. How many of you have seen recent footage of Ahren Gehrman? How many of you have seen post-Sick 03 footage of Karim? How many of you have seen footage of Dexter, post Champion's League? How many of you have ever seen Ilja Mitronov play? I'm guessing lots of people just raised their hands.
The Art of the Game (from now on referred to as "Art") contains lots of good footage of these players. All the Ahren footage is from Todexon 5, and I haven't seen any of it online or anywhere else. The Karim footage is all from Worlds. I was at Worlds, and played a bit with Karim, but the stuff Honza got on camera is way impressive. He really tears things up. The Dexter footage was also really fresh. Unless you were at Todexon 05, Shercle Session, and Worlds, I bet there is a lot of footage that you haven't seen on this tape.
Length The vid felt on the short side, but I prefer people to err on the short side than the opposite. The video is around half an hour. I thought that was fine, but others might be surprised or disappointed with the length.
High level of shred The level of shred is very high on Art. There was only one or two strings which I didn't think were video worthy on the whole tape. I never really felt like I was watching filler, quality-wise. I guarantee there are at least 4 parts where an exclamation of surprise or shock will be yanked from your lungs.
_________________________________________________________
The not-so-good
Camera angles Easily my biggest problem with Art was the filming. There are entire sections shot on tripod, and its not uncommon to see players move out of frame and then return. Even the hand-held footage isn't shot very well. There is lots of headless shredder footage on the tape, and occasionally shredders' feet are also cut off. Its possible some of the head-chopping was intentional (to focus on the feet), but I prefer to see the entire shredder in frame. The shots where feet are cut off is hard to justify. There is one Vasek run on the whole tape, but I had to figure that out based on the playing style. Even in the credit section where the players' names are written, Honza's head is cut off. There are also some strings shot with the handheld where the camera moves around enough that it is distracting.
Capture rate/slow motion The other major problem I had with Art was the camera it was shot with, or how it was encoded. The image is very clear, but fast motions are very blurry. Even in slow motion, quick motions like double downs, symp eggs, and blenders are hard to see clearly. I did frame by frame on some moves, and in individual frames I could see 2 to 3 images of a leg. Some very big moves are on Art but even in slow motion I am not sure if they were hit cleanly. On an internet video, a slow framerate can be acceptable, but if I am paying money for a DVD, I expect it to be clearer.
Editing This is completely subjective, so you may very well have an entirely different opinion than me. Overall, I thought the editing was average, but there were a few places where I thought it could have been edited better. For example, Ales' section starts off with several hard moves shown in slow motion (which, as stated above, doesn't always help that much), and then transitions into combos and runs. Inexplicably however, the section finishes by showing the slow-moed moves from the beginning, only shown in realtime.
In other places in Art difficult midstring moves are shown in slowmotion. This would work better if the slow motion were clearer, but since it isn't I found it broke up the flow of combos. I also found some of the selected moves kind of random.
There are a few places on Art where a difficult move is shown by itself. If you are going to showcase a hard move, it needs to be clean, and on more than one occasion, the highlighted move was thin or "the," but still made it on the video. I think they should have been cut.
_________________________________________________________
Overall impression
Art of the Game contains incredibly high level of shred, and is worth a look simply for the player variety and overall level of play. Its production values aren't as high as other DVDs like Where the Ripwalk Ends, Natural Born Kickers, Fourkast, Champion's League, Sick 03 or even some internet videos. It feels like an underground video, very raw. Its not a DVD you would show to people who have never seen footbag before, but it is something you might watch before going out to shred, in order to get pumped up.
Art is the first shred DVD Honza has produced, and like most freshman efforts, there is room for improvement. Given the incredible level of shred on the DVD, I look forward to future DVDs which are shot better (angles and framerate, and no tripod), because the very idea of having shred of this level shot and presented in a more professional manner would make any footbag afficionado drool.
If anybody else has seen Art of the Game I highly encourage you to post your review in this thread as well. The more feedback Honza gets, and the community gets, the better. I did my best to be objective in this review, so I hope it came across that way, and was informative to somebody out there.
I give your review 10/10! It is also making me really wana buy Honza's DVD.
=BAD.
).
