UNIT V

Planning and Costing : The Process of Making Multimedia- Scheduling- Estimating -

RFPs and Bid Proposals. Designing and Production Content and Talent: Acquiring
Content - Ownership of content created for Project - Acquiring Talent.

Planning and Costing:

Before you begin a multimedia project, you must first develop a sense of its scope and
content, letting the project take shape in your head as you think through the various
methods available to get your message across to your viewers. Then you must develop
an organized outline and a plan that is rational in terms of the skills, time, budget,
tools, and resources you have at hand. Proper project planning is as important as
planning the layout and content. Your plans should be in place before you start to
render graphics, sounds, and other components, and you should refer to them
throughout the project’s execution.

The Process of Making Multimedia:

Plan for the entire process: beginning with your first ideas and ending
with completion and delivery of a finished product.

It is, of course, easiest to plan a project using the experience you have
accumulated in similar past projects. Over time, you can maintain and
improve your multimedia-planning format, just like a batch of sourdough
starter. Just keep adding a little rye and water every time you do a project,
and the starter for your next job gets a bit more potent as your estimates
become tempered by experience.

Idea Analysis

The important thing to keep in mind when you are toying with an idea is
balance. As you think through your idea, you must continually weigh your
purpose or goal against the feasibility and cost of production and delivery.
Use whiteboard, notepaper, and scratch pads as you flesh out your idea,
or use a note-taking or outlining program on your computer. Start with
broad brushstrokes, and then think through each constituent multimedia
element. Ultimately, you will generate a plan of action that will become
your road map for production.

Who needs this project? Is it worthwhile? Do you have the materials at hand to
build it? Do you have the skills to build it? Your idea will be in balance if you have
considered and weighed the proper elements:

■ What is the essence of what you want to do? What is your purpose
and message?
■ Who is your intended audience? Who will be your end users? What
do they already know about the subject?
■ Is there a client, and what does the client want?
■ How can you organize your project?
■ What multimedia elements (text, sounds, and visuals) will best deliver
your message?
■ Will interactivity be required?
■ Is your idea derived from an existing theme that can be enhanced with
multimedia, or will you create something totally new?
■ What hardware is available for development of your project? Is it
enough?
■ How much storage space do you have? How much do you need?
■ What multimedia software is available to you?
■ What are your capabilities and skills with both the software and the
hardware?
■ Can you do it alone? Who can help you?
■ How much time do you have?
■ How much money do you have?
■ How will you distribute the final project?
■ Will you need to update and/or support the final product?

Idea Management Software:

Software such as dotProject, kForge, OpenProj, GanttProject, outlining

programs, and spreadsheets such as Excel can be useful for arranging your ideas and
the many tasks, work items, employee resources, and costs required of your
multimedia project. Project management tools provide the added benefit of built-in
analysis to help you stay within your schedule and budget during the rendering of the
project itself.

Project management software typically provides Critical Path

Method (CPM) scheduling functions to calculate the total duration of a project based
upon each identified task, earmarking tasks that are critical and that, if lengthened,will
result in a delay in project completion.

Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) charts provide

graphic representations of task relationships, showing prerequisites, the
tasks that must be completed before others can commence. Gantt charts
depict all the tasks along a timeline.

Pretesting :

If you decide that your idea has merit, take it to the next step. Define your
project goals in greater detail and spell out what it will take in terms of
skills, content, and money to meet these goals. If you envision a commer
cial product, sketch out how you will sell it. Work up a prototype of the
project on paper, with an explanation of how it will work. All of these steps
help you organize your idea and test it against the real world.

Task Planning :

There may be many tasks in your multimedia project. Here is a checklist of

action items for which you should plan ahead as you think through your
project:
 Design Instructional Framework
 Hold Creative Idea Session(s)
 Determine Delivery Platform
 Determine Authoring Platform
 Assay Available Content
 Draw Navigation Map
 Create Storyboards
 Design Interface
 Design Information Containers
 Research/Gather Content
 Assemble Team
 Build Prototype
 Conduct User Test
 Revise Design
 Create Graphics
 Create Animations
 Produce Audio
 Produce Video
 Digitize Audio and Video
 Take Still Photograph

Prototype Development :

Once you have decided that a project is worth doing, you should develop
a working prototype. This is the point at which you begin serious work at
the computer, building screen mock-ups and a human interface of menus
and button clicks. Your messages and story lines will take shape as you
explore ways of presenting them. For the prototype, sometimes called a
proof-of-concept or feasibility study, you might select only a small
portion of a large project and get that part working as it would in the final
product. Indeed, after trying many different approaches in the course of
prototyping, you may end up with more than one viable candidate for the
final product.

Alpha Development:

As you go forward, you should continually define the tasks ahead, because
just as if you were navigating a supertanker, you should be aware of the
reefs and passages that will appear along your course and prepare for them.
With an alpha stage prototype in hand and a commitment to proceed,
the investment of effort will increase and, at the same time, become more
focused. More people may become involved as you begin to flesh out the
project as a whole.

Beta Development:

By the time your idea reaches the beta stage of development, you will have
committed serious time, energy, and money, and it is likely too late to bail
out. You have gone past the point of no return and should see it through.
But by now you have a project that is looking great! Most of the features
are working, and you are distributing it to a wider arena of testers.
In fact, you are on the downhill slope now, and your concern should be simply
successfully steering the project to its well-defined goal.

Delivery

By the time you reach the delivery stage, you are going gold—producing
the final product. Your worries slide toward the marketplace: how will your
project be received by its intended audience? You must also deal with a
great many practical details, such as who will answer the support hotline
and run the live chat desk, or whether to co-locate a server or trust the
current ISP to handle the predicted increased volume of hits. The alpha,
beta, and final gold stages of project delivery for CD-ROM, DVD.

Scheduling:
Once you have worked up a plan that encompasses the phases, tasks,
and work items you feel will be required to complete your project, you
need to lay out these elements along a timeline. This will usually include
milestones at which certain deliverables are to be done. If you are
working for a client, these are work products that are delivered to the
client for approval. To create this schedule, you must estimate the total
time required for each task and then allocate this time among the number
of persons who will be asynchronously working on the project (see, for
Example) Again, the notion of balance is important: if you can
distribute the required hours to perform a task among several workers,
completion should take proportionally less time.
 In scheduling for a project that is to be rendered for a client, remem
ber that the client will need to approve or sign off on your work at various
stages. This approval process can wreak havoc with your schedule since it
takes time and depends upon factors beyond your control. Perhaps more
important, the client feedback may also require revision of your work. In
order to protect yourself from a capricious client, you need to have points
during the project for client sign-off on the work, meaning that he or
she has approved the work to that point. If the client changes his or her
mind later in the process, then any revisions of the previously approved
materials would require a change order, meaning that the client agrees
to pay the additional costs for making the changes, rather than your hav
ing to eat that unbudgeted cost out of your profit margin.

Estimating:

In production and manufacturing industries, it is a relatively simple

matter to estimate costs and effort. To make chocolate chip cookies,
for example, you need ingredients, such as flour and sugar, and equip
ment, such as mixers, ovens, and packaging machines. Once the process
is running smoothly, you can turn out hundreds of cookies, each tasting
the same and each made of the same stuff.

You then control your costs by fine-tuning known expenses, like negotiating
deals on flour and sugar in quantity, installing more efficient ovens, and hiring
personnel at amore competitive wage. In contrast, making multimedia is not a
repetitive manufacturing process. Rather, it is by nature a continuous research
and development effort characterized by creative trial and error—a
“trying” experience, as described previously. Each new project is some
what different from the last, and each may require application of many
different tools and solutions. Philosophers will counsel you that experi
ence is something you get only after you need it!

RFPs and Bid Proposals:

Often, potential clients don’t have a clue about how to make multimedia,
but they do have a vision or a mandate. You field a telephone call, a voice
describes a need or a want, and you explain how you (and your company)
can satisfy that need. Much of the talk may be instructional as you teach
the client about the benefits and pitfalls of multimedia in all its forms.
You seldom will glean enough information during this initial discus
sion to accurately estimate time or cost, so be prepared to answer these
queries in vague terms while you present your available skill-sets and
capabilities in the most favorable light. If the client is serious and your
instruction well received, in short time you may be able to guide this
client into good choices and reasonable decisions, working together to
conceive and design an excellent product. Discussions will soon turn into
design meetings. Somewhere along the way, you will sign a contract.
Occasionally you may encounter a more formal Request for
Proposal (RFP). These are typically detailed documents from large cor
porations that are “outsourcing” their multimedia development work

A multimedia bid proposal will be passed through several levels of a

company so that managers and directors can evaluate the project’s quality
and its price. The higher a bid proposal goes in the management hierarchy,
the less chance it has of being read in detail. For this reason, you always
want to provide an executive summary or overview as the first page of
your proposal, briefly describing the project’s goals, how the goals will be
achieved, and the cost.

In the body of the proposal, include a section dealing with creative

issues, and describe your method for conveying the client’s message or
meeting the graphic and interactive goals of the project. Also incorporate
a discussion of technical issues, in which you clearly define the target hard
ware platform. If necessary, identify the members of your staff who will
work on the project, and list their roles and qualifications.

The backbone of the proposal is the estimate and project plan that
you have created up to this point. It describes the scope of the work. If the
project is complicated, prepare a brief synopsis of both the plan and the
timetable; include this in the overview. If there are many phases, you can
present each phase as a separate section of the proposal.
Table of Contents

Busy executives want to anticipate a document and grasp its content in

short order. A table of contents or index is a straightforward way to present
the elements of your proposal in condensed overview. In some situa
tions, you may also wish to include an executive summary—a prelude
containing no more than a few paragraphs of pithy description and budget
totals. The summary should be on the cover page or immediately following.
In an electronic submission, you can hotlink to the Table of Contents and
to important sections.

Needs Analysis and Description

In many proposals, it is useful to describe in some detail the reason the

project is being put forward. This needs analysis and description is
particularly common in proposals that must move through a company’s
executive hierarchy in search of approval and funding

Target Audience

All multimedia proposals should include a section that describes the target
audience and target platform. When the end user’s multimedia capabilities
have a broad and uncertain range, it is crucial to describe the hardware and
software delivery platform you intend to provide. For instance, if your project
requires a special browser plug-in, you will need to adjust your multimedia
strategy by revising the design or by requiring the end user to download
the plug-in. Some clients will clearly control the delivery platform, so you
may not need to provide detail regarding system components.

Creative Strategy

A creative strategy section—a description of the look and feel of the

project itself—can be important to your proposal, especially if the execu
tives reviewing your proposal were not present for creative sessions or did
not participate in preliminary discussions. If you have a library of completed
projects that are similar to your proposed effort, it is helpful to include
them with your proposal, pointing the client to techniques and presentation
methods that may be relevant. If you have designed a prototype, describe it
here, or create a separate heading and include graphics and diagrams.

Project Implementation

A proposal must describe the way a project will be organized and sched
uled. Your estimate of costs and expenses will be based upon this descrip
tion. The Project Implementation section of your proposal may contain
a detailed calendar, PERT and Gantt project planning charts, and lists
of specific tasks with associated completion dates, deliverables, and work
hours. This information may be general or detailed, depending upon the
demands of the client. The project implementation section is not just about
how much work there is, but how the work will be managed and performed.
You may not need to specify time estimates in work hours, but rather in the
amount of calendar time required to complete each phase.

Budget

The budget relates directly to the scope of work you have laid out in the
project implementation section. Distill your itemized costs from the project
implementation description and consolidate the minute tasks of each
project phase into categories of activity meaningful to the client.

Designing and Producing

Designing and building multimedia projects go hand in hand.
For CD-ROM and DVD projects, design input is never over until the
product is actually frozen and shipped. The best products are often the
result of continuing feedback and modifications implemented throughout
the production process; projects that freeze a design too early become brittle
in the production workplace, losing the chances for incremental improve
ment. But there is a danger: too much feedback and too many changes
can kill a project, draining it of time and money. Always balance proposed
changes against their cost to avoid the “creeping features” syndrome.

Designers must work closely with producers to ensure that their ideas
can be properly realized, and producers need to confirm the results of
their work with the designers. “These colors seem to work better—what
do you think?” “It plays smoother now, but I had to change the animation
sequence . . .” “Doing the index with highlighted lines slows it down—
can we eliminate this feature?” Feedback loops and good communication
between the design and production effort are critical to the success of a
Project.

Designing:
The design part of your project is where your knowledge and skill with
computers; your talent in graphic arts, video, and music; and your ability
to conceptualize logical pathways through information are all focused to
create the real thing. Design is thinking, choosing, making, and doing. It is
shaping, smoothing, reworking, polishing, testing, and editing. When you
design your project, your ideas and concepts are moved one step closer to
reality. Competence in the design phase is what separates amateurs from
professionals in the making of multimedia.
Designing the Structure:

A multimedia project is no more than an arrangement of text, graphic,

sound, and video elements (or objects). The way you compose these elements
into interactive experiences is shaped by your purpose and messages.

How you organize your material for a project will have just as great an
impact on the viewer as the content itself. Since the explosive growth of
the World Wide Web and proliferation of millions and millions of multi
media-capable HTML documents that can be linked to millions of other
similar documents in the cyberspace of the Web, your designs and inven
tions may actually contribute to the new media revolution: other creators
may discover your work and build upon your ideas and methods.

Navigation :

Mapping the structure of your project is a task that should be started early
in the planning phase, because navigation maps outline the connections
or links among various areas of your content and help you organize your
content and messages.

A navigation map (or site map) provides you with a table of contents as well
as a chart of the logical flow of the interactive interface. While with web sites a site
map is typically a simple hierarchical table of contents with each heading linked to a
page, as a more detailed design document your map may prove very useful to your
project, listing your multimedia objects and describing what happens when the
user interacts.

Just as eight story plots might account for 99 percent of all literature
ever written (boy meets girl, protagonist versus antagonist, etc.), a few basic
structures for multimedia projects will cover most cases: linear naviga
tion, hierarchical navigation, nonlinear navigation, and composite
navigation. Figure 10-1 illustrates the four fundamental organizing struc
tures used in multimedia projects, often in combination:

■ Linear Users navigate sequentially, from one frame or bite of infor

mation to another.

■ Hierarchical Also called “linear with branching,” since users navi

gate along the branches of a tree structure that is shaped by the natural
logic of the content.

■ Nonlinear Users navigate freely through the content of the project,

unbound by predetermined routes.

■Composite Users may navigate freely (nonlinearly) but are occasionally con
strained to linear presentations of movies or critical information and/or to
data that is most logically organized in a hierarchy.
Structural Depth

Professor Judith Junger from the Open University of the Netherlands

in Amsterdam suggests that when you design your multimedia product,
you should work with two types of structure: depth structure and surface
structure. Depth structure represents the complete navigation map and
describes all the links between all the components of your project (see
Figure 10-1). Surface structure, on the other hand, represents the struc
tures actually realized by a user while navigating the depth structure. Thus
the following depth structure might be realized as the following surface structure:
The following depth structure for a quiz thus consists of three possible
surface structures:
The following depth structure for a quiz thus consists of three possible
surface structures:

When you design your navigation map, it helps to think about surface
structure—to view the product from a user’s perspective. Surface struc
tures are of particular interest to marketing firms in tracking users’ routes
through a web site to determine the effectiveness of the site’s design and to
profile a user’s preferences.

Many navigation maps are essentially nonlinear. In these navigational

systems, viewers are always free to jump to an index, a glossary, various
menus, Help or About . . . sections, or even to a rendering of the map itself.
It is often important to give viewers the sense that free choice is available;
this empowers them within the context of the subject matter. Nonetheless,
you should still provide consistent clues regarding importance, emphasis,
and direction by varying typeface size and look, colorizing, indenting, or
using special icons.

The architectural drawings for your multimedia project are the story
boards and navigation maps. The storyboards are married to the naviga
tion maps during the design process, and help to visualize the information
architecture.
A simple navigation map
Designing the User Interface:

The user interface of your multimedia product is a blend of its graphic

elements and its navigation system. If your messages and content are
disorganized and difficult to find, or if users become disoriented or bored,
your project may fail. Poor graphics can cause boredom. Poor navigational
aids can make viewers feel lost and unconnected to the content; or, worse,
viewers may sail right off the edge and just give up and quit the program.

Audio Interfaces:

A multimedia user interface may include important sound elements that

reflect the rhythm of a project and may affect the attitude of your audi
ence. Sounds can be background music, special effects for button clicks,
voice-overs, effects synced to animation, or they may be buried in the audio
track of a video clip. The tempo and style of background music can set the
“tone” of a project. Vivaldi or Bach might be appropriate for a banking or
investment annual report delivered on DVD

Storyboarding a Project

The source material (all that was available) practically sorted itself into
logical groups: a pile of old photographs, a magazine article and news
paper clippings, engineering drawings, official documents, and some
recorded sounds. The first storyboard was a simple hierarchical structure
with branches to each subject area.

The first storyboard

 The Second storyboard

The Third storyboard

PRODUCTION:
Production is the phase when your multimedia project is actu
ally rendered. During this phase you will contend with important and
continuous organizing tasks. There will be times in a complex project
when graphics files seem to disappear from the server, when you forget
to send or cannot produce milestone progress reports, when your voice
talent gets lost on the way to the recording studio, or when your hard
disk crashes. So it’s important to start out on the right foot, with good
organization, and to maintain detailed management oversight during the
entire construction process.
Starting Up

Before you begin your multimedia project, it’s important to check your
development hardware and software and review your organizational
and administrative setup, even if you are working alone. This is a serious
last-minute task.
Working with Clients

Making multimedia for clients is a special case. Be sure that the orga
nization of your project incorporates a system for good communication
between you and the client as well as among the people actually building
the project. Many projects have turned out unhappily because of commu
nication breakdowns.

Client Approval Cycles

Provide good management oversight to avoid endless feedback loops—in
this situation the client is somehow never quite happy, and you are forced
to tweak and edit many times. Manage production so that your client is
continually informed and formally approves by signing off on artwork
and other elements as you build them

Data Storage Media and Transportation

It’s important that the client be able to easily review your work. Remember
that either you and the distant site need to have matching data transfer
systems and media, or you need to provide a web or FTP site for your
project. Organize your system before you begin work, as it may take some
time for both you and the client to agree on an appropriate system and on
the method of transportation.

Tracking

Organize a method for tracking the receipt of material that you will incor
porate into your multimedia project. Even in small projects, you will be
dealing with many digital bits and pieces.
Develop a file-naming convention specific to your project’s struc
ture. Store the files in directories or folders with logical names. Version
control of your files (tracking editing changes) is critically important, too,
especially in large projects

Copyrights

Commonly used authoring platforms may allow access to the software

programming code or script that drives a particular project. The source
code of HTML pages on the Web may also be easily viewed.
In such an open-code environment, are you prepared to let others see
your programming work? Is your code neat and commented? Perhaps your
mother cautioned you to wear clean underclothing in case you were sud
denly on a table among strangers in a hospital emergency room—well,
apply this rule to your code

Content and Talent

Every multimedia project includes content. It is the “stuff ” from
which you fashion your messages. It is also the information and material
that forms the heart of your project, and it is that which defines what your
project is about.

Practically, content can be any and all of the elements of multimedia.

You might use your collection of wedding photographs and videotapes
to create a special multimedia newsletter for family and relatives. Or you
might edit portions of the audio track from these videotapes and capture
still images to build a multimedia database of aunts, uncles, and cousins.
This material is your project’s content.

Content can have low and high production value. If you hire a team
of professionals to shoot your wedding video, and then they digitize images
and audio clips at broadcast quality, your content will have high production
value.

Acquiring Content
Content acquisition can be one of the most expensive and time-consuming
tasks in organizing a multimedia project. You must plan ahead, allocating
sufficient time (and money) for this task.
■ If your project describes the use of a new piece of robotics machinery,
for example, will you need to send a photographer to the factory for
the pictures? Or can you digitize existing photographs?
■ Suppose you are working with 100 graphs and charts about the future
of petroleum exploration. Will you begin by collecting the raw data
from reports and memos, or start with an existing spreadsheet or data
base? Perhaps you have charts that have already been generated from
the data and stored as TIFF or JPEG files?
■ You are developing an interactive guide to the trails in a national park,
complete with video clips of the wildlife that hikers might encounter
on the trails. Will you need to shoot original video footage, or are there
existing tapes for you to edit?

Using Content Created by Others

When a work is created, certain rights, such as for the work’s public display
or performance, its use in a broadcast, or its reproduction, are granted to
its creator. Among the rights most relevant to a multimedia producer are
electronic rights—the rights to publish a work in a computer-based
storage and delivery medium such as a CD-ROM or on the Web. Since
the late 1980s, investors in the multimedia marketplace have been quietly
purchasing electronic rights (the right to reproduce works in electronic
form) to the basic building blocks of content—including films, videos,
photographic collections, and textual information bases—knowing that in
the future these elements can and perhaps will be converted from their
traditional form to computer-based storage and delivery

Locating Preexisting Content

Preexisting content can come from a variety of sources, ranging from a

trunk of old photographs in your neighbor’s attic to a stock house or image
bank offering hundreds of thousands of hours of film and video or still
images, available for licensing for a fee.
If your needs are simple and fairly flexible, you may be able to use
material from collections of clip art. Such collections of photographs,
graphics, sounds, music, animation, and video are becoming widely avail
able from many sources, for anywhere from fifty to several hundred dol
lars
Ownership of Content
Created for a Project
In the process of developing your multimedia project, interfaces will be
designed, text written, lines of code programmed, and original artwork
illustrated with photographs, animations, musical scores, sound effects,
and video footage. Each of these elements is an original work. If you are
creating a project single-handedly for yourself, you own the copyright
outright. If other persons who are not your employees also contribute to
the final product, they may own copyright of the element created by them
or may share joint ownership of the product unless they assign or license
their ownership rights to you. Never rely on an oral agreement for assign
ment of rights.

The ownership of a project created by employees in the course of

their employment belongs solely to the employer if the work fits the
requirements of a “work made for hire.” To meet the definition of a work
made for hire, several factors must be weighed to determine whether the
individual is legally an employee or an independent contractor. Among
these factors are where the work is done, the relationship between the
parties, and who provides the tools and equipment.