Our friends over at Coudal Partners pointed us to a Live Layer Tennis match in progress… This one is not only colorful and fun.. the creative forces are battling with flash. All matches take place on Fridays, live at 2pm Chicago time or GMT-6, Pop over and take a peek.
Welcome to Layer Tennis’ first foray into the fourth dimension.
Considering the constraints of most modern browsers, we had to skip the third dimension (depth), so the fourth will have to do. Time has always been an essential element of the game, the competitors (and commentators) face a cruel 15-minute deadline, and — hear me when I say — those seconds tick away much faster at LT HQ than they do in your office, as you kill the waning hours of your work week.
This week, however, temporal space will actually tear through our 900×280-pixel battlefield, as renowned illustrators Trevor Van Meter and James Hutchinson face off in Adobe Flash. I pity their poor souls; if designing/illustrating/typesetting a volley isn’t enough to do in a quarter-hour, they must find time to animate the volley as well. While this added challenge is likely to simplify the actual graphic content of the match (fine by me, I’m a bit of a minimalist), we’re likely to see some great storytelling, as both competitors excel in that area, and each has an arsenal of ready-made characters that would make old Walt D. blush. (As I write this, I’m getting word that James, at least, is creating a new set of characters just for the match).
