MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS

UNIT-V

Planning and Costing - Introduction

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.

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?

 You can maintain balance between purpose and feasibility by dynami-
cally adding and subtracting multimedia elements as you stretch and shape
your idea. You can start small and build from minimum capabilities toward
a satisfactory result in an additive way. Both additive and
subtractive processes can work in concert and can yield very useful cost
estimates and a production road map.

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 manage-
ment 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.

CPM - Project management software typically provides Critical Path Method

(CPM) scheduling functions to calculate the total duration of a project based upon
each identified task, showing prerequisites.

PERT - Program Evaluation Review Technique (PERT) charts provide graphic

representations of task relationships.

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:
Building a Team
Multimedia is an emerging technology requiring a set
of skills so broad that multimedia itself remains poorly
defined. Players in this technology come from all corners
of the computer and art worlds as well as from a variety
of other disciplines, so if you need to assemble a team,
you need to know the people and skills it takes to make
multimedia. Building a matrix chart of required skills is often
helpful to describe the makeup of your team. The skills
and software capabilities available to you are not as
limiting as your list of required hardware–you can always budget for
new and more powerful software and for the learning curve (or con-
sultant fees) required to make use of it. Indeed, authoring software is
usually necessary only for development of the project, not its playback
or delivery, and should be a cost or learning burden not directly passed
to end users.
If you are building a complex web site, sub-
stitute Java/Ruby programmer, HTML/CSS programmer, and Server
Specialist into the proper row.

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.

During this phase you can test ideas, mock up interfaces, exercise the
hardware platform, and develop a sense about where the alligators live.
These alligators are typically found in the swampy edges of your own
expertise; in the dark recesses of software platforms that almost-but-
not-quite perform as advertised and in your misjudgment of the effort
required for various tasks. The alligators will appear unexpectedly behind
you and nip at your knees, unless you explore the terrain a little before you
start out.

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.

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. 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.

Scheduling can be difficult for multimedia projects because so much

of the making of multimedia is artistic trial and error. A recorded sound
will need to be edited and perhaps altered many times. Animations need
to be run again and again and adjusted so that they are smooth and
properly placed. A QuickTime or MPEG movie may require many
hours of editing and tweaking before it works in sync with other screen
activities.

Scheduling multimedia projects is also difficult because the technol-

ogy of computer hardware and software is in constant flux, and upgrades
while your project is under way may drive you to new installations and
concomitant learning curves. The general rule of thumb when working
with computers and new technology under a deadline is that everything
will take longer to do than you think it will.
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 a more
competitive wage. In contrast, making multimedia is not a repeti-
tive 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!
As a general rule, there are three elements that can vary in project esti-
mates: time, money, and people. Iif you decrease any one
of these elements, you’ll generally need to increase one or both of the oth-
ers. For example, if you have very little time to do a project (an aggressive
schedule), it will cost more money in overtime and premium sweat, and it
may take more people. If you have a good number of people, the project
should take less time. By increasing the money spent, you can actually
decrease the number of people required by purchasing efficient (but costly)
experts; this may also reduce the time required.
Do your best to estimate the amount of time it will take to perform
each task in your plan. Mul-
tiply this estimate by your
hourly billing rate. Sum the
total costs for each task,
and you now have an esti-
mate of the project’s total
time and cost. Though this
simple formula is easy, what
is not so easy is diligently
remaining within the bud-
geted time and money for
each task. For this, you need
good tracking and manage-
ment oversight.
If you are working for an outside client, you will also need to deter-
mine a payment schedule. Payments are often divided into thirds: one-
third up front upon the signing of a contract, one-third as work products
are delivered and approved during the alpha and beta development phases,
and one-third upon final approval of the completed production.

Billing Rates
Your billing rate should be set according to your cost of doing business plus
a reasonable profit margin. Typical billing rates for multimedia production
companies and web designers depending
upon the work being done and the person doing it. If consultants or special-
ists are employed on a project, the billing rate can go much higher. You can
establish a rate that is the same for all tasks, or you can specify different
rates according to the person assigned to a task. The Graphic Artists Guild
(www.gag.org) provides its members a Pricing & Ethical Guidelines manual
with pricing information based on real industry surveys. Pricing guides are
also available at www.brennerbooks.com.
Everyone who contributes to a project should have two rates associ-
ated with their work: the employee’s cost to the employer (including salary
and benefits), and the employee’s rate billed to the customer. The employ-
ee’s cost, of course, is not included in your estimate, but you need to know this as
part of your estimate—because your profit margin is the differ-
ence between the rate you charge the client and the cost to your company,
less a proportion of overhead expenses (rental or leasing of space, utilities,
phones, shared secretarial and administrative services, and so on). If your
profit margin is negative, you should reconsider both your project plan and
your long-term business plan.

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 favourable 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.
For an example, a document that provides background
information, scope of work, and information about the bidding process.
Still, you should note that there is little “hard” information in this docu-
ment; most bid proposals require contact with the client to fill in details
prior to bidding.

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. Cost estimates for each
phase or deliverable milestone, as well as payment schedules, should follow the
description of the work. If this section is lengthy, it should also include a
summary.

Finally, include a list of your terms. Contract terms may become a legally
binding document, so have your terms reviewed by legal counsel. Terms should
include the following:
A description of your billing rates and invoicing policy (for example,
what percentage is to be paid up front, how much at certain mile-stones, and how
much upon delivery).
Your policy on client sign-offs and change order costs.
Your policy regarding third-party licensing fees for run-time modules and special
drivers (the client pays).
Specific statements of who owns what upon completion of the project.
You may wish to retain the rights to show parts of the work for your own
promotional purposes and to reuse in other projects segments of code and
algorithms that you develop.
An assurance to the client that you will not disclose proprietary information.
Your right to display your credits appropriately within the work.
Your unlimited right to work for other clients.
A disclaimer for liability and damages arising out of the work.
 It is a significant task to write a project proposal that creatively sells a
multimedia concept, accurately estimates the scope of work, and pro-vides
realistic budget costs. The proposal often becomes a melting pot, in that you
develop the elements of your idea during early conversations with a potential
client and add the results of discussions on technique and approach with graphic
artists and instructional designers. You blend what the client wants done with
what you can actually do, given the client’s budgetary constraints, and when the
cauldron of compromise cools, your proposal is the result.

The Cover and Package

You have many options for designing the look and feel of your proposal.
And though we are often warned to avoid judging a book by its cover, the
reality is that it takes about two seconds for executives to assess the quality
of the document they are holding. Sometimes, they decide before even
touching it. Size up the people who will read your proposal and ferret out
their expectations; tailor your proposal to these expectations.
If your client judges from the cover of your proposal that the docu-
ment inside is amateurish rather than professional, you are already fighting
an uphill battle. There are two strategies for avoiding this negative first
impression:
Develop your own special style for a proposal cover and package,1.
including custom fonts, cover art and graphics, illustrations and
figures, unique section and paragraph styles, and a clean binding. Do
your proposal first class.
Make the entire package plain and simple, yet businesslike. The plain2.
part of the approach means not fussing with too many fonts and
type styles. This austerity may be particularly successful for proposals
to government agencies, where 12-point Times New Roman or
12-point Courier may be not just a de facto standard, but a required
document format. If you must submit hardcopy documents in addi-
tion to PDF or DOC files, a stapled sheaf of papers is adequate.
Don’t try to dress up your plain presentation with Pee-Chee folders
or cheap plastic covers; keep it lean and mean.

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.
For a project bound for a web site, the design may be completed and
implemented, yet the site’s content may be regularly updated and changed,
so the project may (by its very design) never be completely frozen. In such
cases, it is especially important to set clear deadlines and milestones.
Just as the architect of a high-rise office tower must understand how
to utilize the materials with which he or she works (lest the construction
collapse on trusting clients), designers of multimedia projects must also
understand the strengths and limitations of the elements that will go into
their project. It makes no sense, for example, to design the audio elements
of a multimedia project in memory-consuming 16-bit, 44.1 kHz stereo
sound when the delivery medium will not have sufficient room for it; or
to produce lengthy, full-screen, video clips to play at 30 frames per second
over the Internet when targeted end users connect by dial-up modems; or
to design lovely 1024 × 768 pixel graphics for elementary school laptops
when that environment supports only 800 × 600 pixel screens. Architects
don’t design inner city parking garages with 14-foot ceilings and wide
turning radii for 18-wheel big rigs, and they don’t build them using wood
or mud laid on a swampy foundation.

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.

Depending on the scope of your project and the size and style of your
team, you can take two approaches to creating an original interactive multimedia
design. You can spend great effort on the storyboards, or graphic outlines,
describing the project in exact detail—using words and sketches for each and
every screen image, sound, and navigational choice, right down to specific colors
and shades, text content, attributes and fonts, button shapes, styles, responses,
and voice inflections. (This approach is particularly well suited for teams that can
build prototypes quickly and then rapidly convert them into finished goods.) Or
you can use less-detailed storyboards as a rough schematic guide, allowing you to
exert less design
sweat up front and expend more effort actually rendering the product at a
workstation.

The method you choose depends on whether the same people will do the
whole thing (both the designing and the implementing) or whether
implementation will be tasked or outsourced to a new team who will then need a
detailed specification (that is, a detailed storyboard and sketches). Both
approaches require the same thorough knowledge of the tools and capabilities of
multimedia, and both demand a story-board or a project outline. The first
approach is often favored by clients who wish to tightly control the production
process and labor costs. The
second approach gets you more quickly into the nitty-gritty, hands-on tasks, but
you may ultimately have to give back that time because more iterations and
editing will be required to smooth the work in progress. In either case, the more
planning on paper, the better and easier it will be to construct the project.

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 inventions may actually contribute to
the new media revolution: other creators may discover your work and build upon
your ideas and methods.

On some projects, you may be both the designer and the programmer.
This can work well because you will understand how the design features you
choose will actually be implemented. Indeed, your design will be tempered, if not
defined, by your programming and coding skills, and you will be less likely to
specify features impossible or overly difficult to realize.

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.

Linear-- Users navigate sequentially, from one frame or bite of information

to another.

Hierarchical-- Also called “linear with branching,” since users navigate

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 mov-
ies or critical information and/or to
data that is most logically organized in
a hierarchy.
The method you provide to your viewers
for navigating from one place to another in
your project is part of the user interface. The
success of the user interface depends not
only upon its general design and graphic
art implementations but also upon myriad
engineering details—such as the position
of interactive buttons or hot spots rela-
tive to the user’s current activity, whether
these buttons “light up,” and whether you
use standard Macintosh or Windows pull-
down menus. A good user interface is criti-
cal to the overall success of your project.
The nature of your interface will vary
depending on its purpose: browsing, data-
base access, entertainment, information,
instruction, reference, marketing, and gam-
ing projects require different approaches
and different navigation strategies.
Structural Depth

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. 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:

When you design your navigation map, it helps to think about surface
structure—to view the product from a user’s perspective. Surface structures 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. When a user’s preferences are known, a custom web site experience
can be dynamically tailored and delivered to that user.

Acquisition and management of such profiling data is a hot topic, with

privacy advocates claiming the personal information revealed in these surface
structures is akin to a person’s medical and health records. 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.

In a simple navigation map, where the subject matter of a small project to

teach the basics of animation was organized schematically. The items in boxes are
not only descriptions of content but also active buttons that can take users
directly to that content. At any place in the project, users can call up this screen
and then navigate directly to their chosen subject.
 A storyboard for this same project, originally built for a small black-
and-white low-resolution display, is organized sequentially, screen by
screen, and each screen is sketched out with design notes and specifications
before rendering.

Multimedia provides great power for jumping about within your

project’s content. And though it is important to give users a sense of free
choice, too much freedom can be disconcerting, and viewers may get lost.
Try to keep your messages and content organized along a steady stream of
the major subjects, letting users branch outward to explore details. Always
provide a secure anchor, with buttons that lead to expected places, and
build a familiar landscape to which users may return at any time.
If your material deals with a chronology of
events occurring over time, for example, you may wish to design the struc-
ture as a linear sequence of events and then send users along that sequence,
allowing them to jump directly to specific dates or time frames if desired. A
timeline will graphically show the positioning of your
multimedia elements and can be helpful during the design phase: where
there are overlapping events, you may wish to create cross-sectional paths
or views for a “slice in time.”

Even within a linear, time-based structure, you may still wish to sort
events into categories regardless of when they occur. There is no reason you
can’t do this and offer more than one method of navigating through your
content.

Hot Spots, Hyperlinks, and Buttons

Most multimedia authoring systems allow you to make any part of the
screen, or any object, into a hot spot. When users hover over or click a hot spot at
that location, something happens, which makes multimedia not just interactive,
but also exciting. Hot spots can be given more specific names based upon either
their function or form. For example, if clicking the hot spot connects the user to
another part of the document or program or to a different program or web site, it
is referred to as a link or hyperlink. If the hot spot is a graphic image designed to
look like a push button or toggle switch, it is called a button, more formally
defined as a meaningful graphic image that you click or “touch” to make
something happen.
Hot spots can be text or graphic images. Most authoring systems provide a tool
for creating text buttons of various styles (radio buttons, check boxes, or labeled
push buttons, for example), as well as graphic buttons.
 Icons are graphic objects designed specifically to be meaningful as buttons
and are usually small (although size is, in theory, not a determining factor). Icons
are fundamental graphic objects symbolic of an activity or concept:
Once a style has been selected, you need to determine how your user will know
that the button is active or is being selected. Highlighting a button or object, or
changing its state, when the cursor rolls over it or the button is clicked, is the
most common method of distinguishing it as the object of interest. Highlighting is
usu-
ally accomplished by altering the object’s colors and optionally moving the object
a pixel or two or, if text, changing its size. Depending upon how you highlight, you
can make a button appear off (not pressed) or on (pressed) as illustrated on the
left.
Or you can use an animated GIF image that animates when the mouse hovers
over it. The dove in the illustration begins flying when the mouse passes over the
word “Habitat.”

Your navigation design must provide buttons that make sense, so their
actions will be intuitively understood by means of their icon or graphic
representation, or via text cues. Do not force your viewers to learn many new
or special icons; keep the learning curve to a minimum. It’s also important
to include buttons that perform basic housekeeping tasks, such as quitting
the project at any given point, or canceling an activity.

Hot Spots in Web Pages HTML documents do not directly support

interactive graphic buttons that follow the rules of good interface design— by
highlighting or otherwise confirming a hover or mouse-down action. In most web
browsers, you know you have clicked on a linked graphic (a button) only when the
cursor changes while the browser seeks another document and loads it. But you
can make plain and animated buttons for your HTML documents on the Web
using plug-ins such as Flash or JavaScripts. A simple JavaScript or CSS a:hover in an
HTML document can replace one image with another on mouseOver or hover.
Other ways to make interesting buttons and interactive graphical interfaces on
the World Wide Web. The simplest hot spots on the Web are the text anchors
that link a document to other documents. This is because a browser usually
indicates that some specific text is a hot link or anchor by coloring or underlining
the text so it stands out from the body. Default colors for anchor text are a user-
defined preference, though you can override the default in the <BODY> tag.
Using CSS in web site design, text can be easily colored and highlighted on hover
and hyperlinked or anchored to other document URLs on clicking. Drop-down text
menus allow for a dense hierarchy of menu choices to be displayed. Other
common buttons found on the Web consist of small JPEG or GIF graphic images
that are themselves anchor links. Browsers indicate that an image is hot by
drawing a border around it (you can remove this border by placing BORDER=“0”
into the <IMG> tag). Larger images may be sectioned into hot areas with
associated links;

Icons
In Macintosh and Windows operating systems, icons have a special
meaning, in that they constitute a suite of image resources that are linked
to and identify an application, file, volume, or service.

On the Macintosh, icon image files (.icns) can contain one or more images
of 16 × 16, 32 × 32, 48 × 48, 128 × 128, 256 × 256, and 512 × 512 pixels as well as
alpha channels for transparency masking. The Mac operating system
automatically scales the image(s) to display at other sizes. To use your own icon
for a file or folder, open the Get Info . . . dialog (command-i), click once on the
icon shown at the top left of the Get Info panel to highlight it, and paste any 512 ×
512–pixel bitmap from the clipboard.

The old icon is replaced with the new. You can also highlight an icon in the
Get Info panel and copy it to the clipboard (command-c) for pasting into
your image editor or directly into a project.

Windows 7 icons are 256 × 256 pixels and are scaled to Extra Large, Large,
Medium, or Small sizes in the Views menu. To replace a folder or alias icon with
your own, simply create a 256 × 256 pixel .png file and save it. Then go to a folder
or shortcut and right-click it; select Properties. Choose the Customize tab and
select Change Icon. Browse to find your saved icon and click OK. Building and
saving icon files is simpler using an icon editor such as IcoFX (http://icofx.ro/) or
the ICOformat plugin for Photoshop (www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/#icoformat). If
you want to use a system icon within your project, it is often quickest to capture
or grab it off the screen and place it directly into your project as a bitmap. Use
caution, however, because the design of some icons (particularly those using
corporate logos) may be protected by copyright or trademark. Browsers
automatically look for a tiny 16 × 16 pixel icon file named favicon.ico in the root of
a web site, which they will display in one or more places in their “chrome” (the
toolbars, status bars, sidebars, menus, and navigation elements surrounding the
web page itself).
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.

Novice/Expert Modes
Be aware that there are two types of end users: those who are computer
literate and those who are not. Creating a user interface that will satisfy both
types has been a design dilemma since the invention of computers. The simplest
solution for handling varied levels of user expertise is to provide a modal
interface, where the viewer can simply click a Novice/Expert button and change
the approach of the whole interface—to be either more or less detailed or
complex. Modal interfaces are common on bulletin boards, for example, allowing
novices to read menus and
select desired activities, while experts can altogether eliminate the time-
consuming download and display of menus and simply type an activity code
directly into an executable command line. Both novices and experts alike may
quickly learn to click the mouse and skip the annoying ragtime piece you chose for
background music.

Unfortunately, in multimedia projects, modal interfaces are not a good

answer. It’s best to avoid designing modal interfaces because they tend to
confuse the user. Typically, only a minority of users are expert, and so the
majority are caught in between and frustrated. The solution is to build your
multimedia project to contain plenty of navigational power, providing access to
content and tasks for users at all levels, as well as a help system to provide some
hand-holding and reassurance. Present all this power in easy-to-understand
structures and concepts, and use clear textual cues. Above all, keep the interface
simple! Even experts will balk at a complex screen full of tiny buttons and arcane
switches, and will appreciate having neat and clean doorways into your project’s
content.

GUIs
 The Macintosh and Windows graphical user interfaces are successful partly
because their basic point-and-click style is
simple, consistent, and quickly mastered. Both these GUIs offer built-in
help systems, and both provide standard patterns of activity that produce
standard expected results. The following actions, for example, are consis-
tently performed by similar keystrokes when running most programs on
the Macintosh or in Windows:
For your multimedia interface to be successful, you, too, must be con-
sistent in designing both the look and the behavior of your human inter-
face. Multimedia authoring systems provide you with the tools to design
and implement your own graphical user interface from scratch. Be prudent
with all that flexibility, however. Unless your content and messages are
bizarre or require special treatment, it’s best to stick with accepted con-
ventions for button design and grouping, visual and audio feedback, and
navigation structure.
Stick with real-world meta-
phors that will be understood by
the widest selection of poten-
tial users. For example, consider
using the well-known trash can
for deleting files, a hand cursor for dragging objects, and a clock or an
hourglass for pauses. If your material is time-oriented, develop metaphors for
past, present, and future. If it is topic-oriented, choose metaphors
related to the topics themselves. If it is polar (the pros and cons of an issue,
for example), choose relevant contrasting images.

Users like to be in control, so avoid hidden commands and unusual

keystroke/mouse click combinations. Design your interface with the goal that no
instruction manual or special training will be required to move through your
project. Users do not like to have to remember keywords or special codes, so
always make the full range of options easily available as interactive buttons or
menu items. And finally, users do make mistakes, so allow them a chance to
escape from inadvertent or dangerous predicaments. Keep your interface simple
and friendly.

Graphical Approaches

Designing excellent computer screens requires a special set of fine art skills,
and not every programmer or graduate in fine arts may be suited to creating
computer graphics. Like programmers who must keep up with current operating
systems and languages, computer graphic artists must also stay informed about
the rapidly changing canvas of new features, techniques, applications, and
creative tools.

The artist must make broad design choices: cartoon stick figures for a
children’s game, rendered illustrations for a medical reference, scanned bit- maps
for a travel tour of Europe. The graphic artwork must be appropriate not only for
the subject matter, but for the user as well. Once the approach is decided, the
artist has to put real pixels onto a computer screen and do the work. A
multimedia graphic artist must always play the role of the end user during the
design and rendering process, choosing colors that look good, specifying text
fonts that “speak,” and designing buttons that are clearly marked for what they
do.

Producing

By the time you reach the development phases of your multimedia project
and you start building, you should already have taken care to prepare your plan
and to get organized. The project plan now becomes your step-by-step
instruction manual for building the product.For many multimedia developers,
following this plan and actually doing the construction work—being down in the
trenches of hands-on creation and production—is the fun part of any project.

Production is the phase when your multimedia project is actually 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. This rule applies to projects large and
small,
projects for you or for a client, and projects with 1 or 20 people on staff.
Above all, provide a good time-accounting system for everyone working
on the project.

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. It prevents you from finding yourself halfway through
the project with nowhere to put your graphics files and digitized movie
segments when you’re out of disk space, or stuck with an incompatible
version of a critical software tool, or with a network that bogs down and
quits every two days. Such incidents can take many days or weeks to resolve,
so try to head off as many potential problems as you can before you begin.
Here are some examples of things to think about.
Desk and mind clear of obstructions?
Best computers you can afford?
Time-accounting and management system in place?
Biggest (or most) monitors you can afford?
Sufficient disk storage space for all work files?
System for regular backup of critical files?
Conventions or protocols for naming your working files and managing
source documents?
Latest version of your primary authoring software?
Latest versions of software tools and accessories?
Communication pathways open with client?
Breathing room for administrative tasks?
Financial arrangements secure (retainer in the bank)?
Expertise lined up for all stages of the project?

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. Occasionally, the technology will
improve during development and you may be able to offer new features
that will improve your project. Develop a scheme that specifies the number
and duration of client approval cycles, and then provide a mechanism
for change orders when changes are requested after sign-off. For change
orders, remember that the client should pay extra and the changes should
be costly.

Tracking

Organize a method for tracking the receipt of material that you will
incorporate 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 structure. 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. If more than one person is working on a group of files,
be sure that you always know what version is the latest and who has the current
version. If storage space allows, archive all file iterations, in case you change your
mind about something and need to go back to a prior rendering.

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 suddenly on a table
among strangers in a hospital emergency room—well, apply this rule to your
code. You can insert a copyright statement in your project that clearly (and
legally) designates the code as your intellectual property, but the code, tricks, and
programming techniques remain accessible for study, learning, and tweaking by
others.

Hazards and Annoyances

Even experienced producers and developers commonly run into at least
some light chop and turbulence during the course of a project’s development. The
experts, however, never crash when their vehicle shudders or loses some altitude.
You can expect the going to get rough at any number of stages—from trying to
design the perfect interface, to endless testing to problems with client sign-off or
payment. Expect problems beyond your control, and be prepared to accept them
and solve them.

Small annoyances, too, can become serious distractions that are

counterproductive. The production stage is a time of great creativity, dynamic
intercourse among all contributors, and, above all, hard work. Be prepared to deal
with some common irritants, for example:
Creative coworkers who don’t take (or give) criticism well■■
Clients who cannot or are not authorized to make decisions■■
More than two all-nighters in a row■■
Too many custom-coded routines■■
Too many meetings; off-site meetings■■
Missed deadlines■■
Software and hardware upgrades that interrupt your normal operations ■■

If your project is a team effort, then it is critical that everyone works well together
—or can at least tolerate one another’s differences—especially when the going
gets tough. Pay attention to the mental health of all personnel involved in your
project, and be aware of the dynamics of the group and whether people are being
adversely affected by individual personalities. If problems arise, deal with them
before they become hazardous; the mix of special creative talents required for
multimedia can be volatile. If you stay organized and flexible throughout, you will
complete your project successfully.

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.

Content has to come from somewhere—either you make it or you acquire it.
Whether you make it, borrow it, or buy it depends upon your project’s needs,
your time constraints, and your pocketbook. Content that is destined for sale to
the public is also wrapped up in numerous legal issues. Who owns the content?
Do you have the proper rights to use it?
Copyright laws, for example, establish rights for the creators or owners
of literary works; musical works; dramatic works; pictorial, graphic, and
sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; and sound
recordings. Do you have licenses for protected works and signed releases
from anyone who appears in your project?
 
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. This is smart, but
not easy; the many union-supported contract restrictions and performer
and producer rights are not only complicated and difficult to trace but also
very expensive to acquire. Obtaining the rights to content is not, however, a
hopeless undertaking.
Depending on the type and source of your content, the negotiations for
usage rights can be simple and straightforward, or they may require complicated
contracts and a stack of release forms. Each potential content provider you
approach will likely have his or her own set of terms that you need to look at
carefully, so that the terms are broad enough not to constrain the scope of your
multimedia project.

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 available from many
sources, for anywhere from fifty to several hundred dollars. Part of the value of
many of these packages is that you are granted unlimited use, and you can be
comfortable creating derivative versions tailored to your specific application.
Carefully read the license agreement that comes with the collection before
assuming you can use the material in any manner. In the six-point italicized type
on the back of the agreement, you may discover that the licensor offers no
guarantee that the contents of the collection are original works. Thus, the licensor
bears no responsibility to indemnify you for inadvertently infringing on the
copyrights of a third party. Even if the collection is described as allowing “free
use,” you may discover that the collection comes with severe restrictions on the
way material can be used, or that a royalty is required for any use beyond wall-
paper on your computer.

If your content needs are more specific or complex, a good place to start
your search for material might be at a still photo library, a sound library, or a stock
footage house. These “stock” resources may be public or private and may contain
copyrighted works as well as materials that are in the public domain. Public
domain means either that the work was never copyrighted in the first place or its
copyright protection has expired over time and not been renewed; you can use
public domain material without a license.In addition to stock photos and videos
clips, there are whole collections of flash animations and components, web site
templates, sound effect libraries, and even 3-D models available for downloading
and integration into multimedia projects. Many are not free, but stock material
may save you many hours of effort.

Copyrights
 Copyright protection applies to “original works of authorship fixed in any
tangible medium of expression. Before you can use someone else’s work in
your multimedia project, you must first obtain permission from the owner
of the copyright. If you do not do this, you may find yourself being sued for
copyright infringement (unauthorized use of copyrighted material). Several
changes in the law have created confusion over copyright protections. One
change is that works now come under copyright protection as soon as they are
created and presented in a fixed form. Prior to 1976,protection was only granted
upon registration, but now works do not have to be registered with the U.S.
Copyright Office to be protected. Because of this there is another crucial change:
works no longer need a properly formatted statement of copyright ownership to
be protected. Many people assume, because of the pre-1976 rules, that if there is
not a copyright statement, the work is available to be used. While that may be
true for older works, you should start with the assumption that a work is
protected, unless there is a specific statement that it is in the public domain.
There are fair use exceptions in which copyrighted material can be used without
permission, but they are very limited and specific—primarily for educational and
journalistic use
and rarely for commercial use—so you should consult an attorney before
assuming this exception applies to work you wish to use in a project.
Owning a copy of a work does not entitle you to reproduce the work, and you still
need to obtain permission from the copyright owner to use it. If you buy a
painting from an artist, the artist retains the copyright unless it is assigned to you.
You do not have the right to reproduce the painting in any form, such as in
postcards or a calendar, without permission.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

As rights and ownership are redefined for the information age, various
rights management technologies are emerging and competing to become industry
standard. Apple’s iTunes Store has sold more than six billion songs since going
online in 2003. Songs downloaded from iTunes were protected with a DRM
scheme called FairPlay, which works within Apple’s QuickTime container structure
and limits the number of devices upon which the tune can be played. Microsoft
Windows Media Rights Manager (Windows only) and the Windows Media Player
12 format incorporate extensive DRM capabilities. A Digital Object Identifier
(DOI), which has been proposed for identifying and exchanging intellectual
property, provides a framework for managing intellectual content, linking
customers with content suppliers, facilitating electronic commerce, and enabling
automated copyright management for all types of media. The
Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 has set the rules.
Derivative Works
Any text taken verbatim, or any image or music per-
fectly copied, clearly requires permission from its owner to incorporate it
into your work. But there are some other, less clear-cut issues. For example,
as a starter for your work, you may wish to incorporate but a tiny portion of
an image owned by someone else, altering the image until the original is no
longer recognizable. Is this legal? Indeed, how much of the original must
you change before the product becomes yours or remains a derivative
work? There are no simple answers to these tough questions.

Permissions
Permission must also be obtained to use copyrighted text.
Sample language follows for requesting permission to reprint copyrighted
text material and sample terms that you might expect from the copyright
owner.

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 assignment of rights. You should make it your practice in every
project to get
all assignments of rights or licensing terms in writing to protect everyone
involved. You and your best friend may collaborate on a project today
based on a handshake, but if there is a falling out that results in a dispute
over ownership, having the terms in writing will save both of you from an
expensive legal battle over who owns what.

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.

If the individual contributing to a project is not an employee, the

commissioned work must fall within one of the following “work made for hire”
categories: a contribution to a collective work, a work that is part of a motion
picture or other audiovisual work, a translation, a supplementary work, a
compilation, an instructional text, a test, answer material for a test. Even if the
work falls within one of these categories, be sure to get an agreement in writing
from every individual contributing to the work that it is being created as a work
for hire.

The copyright ownership of works created in whole or in part by persons

who fall under the definition of independent contractor may belong to that
contractor unless the work is specially ordered or commissioned for use and
qualifies as a work made for hire, in which case the copyright belongs to the
entity commissioning the work.

A copyright can belong to a single individual or entity, or it may be shared

jointly by several entities. Make sure that copyright ownership issues have been
resolved, in writing, before people contribute to your project.

Acquiring Talent

After you have tested everybody you know and you still have vacant seats
in your project, you may need to turn to professional talent. Getting the perfect
actor, model, or narrator’s voice is critical. You don’t want to settle for a voice or
an actor who is not quite polished or is ill suited to the part, or your whole project
may have an amateurish feel.

Locating the Professionals You Need

Before you can safely put a professional in front of a camera or a micro-

phone, you have to find the talent first and then deal with hiring and union
contracts. Begin by calling a talent agency and explain what you need. The agency
will probably suggest several clients who might fit your needs and
send you to their web site for video or audio samples of the actors’ work.
After reviewing the samples, you can arrange auditions of the best candidates, at
your office or at a studio. You can also get in touch with several agencies and put
out a casting call for screen or audio auditions. Furthermore, you are not limited
to using union talent, and if your call is posted on bulletin boards in public places,
you may find yourself with many applicants, both union and nonunion, who are
eager for the work.

Working with Union Contracts

The two unions, AFTRA and SAG, have similar contracts and terms for minimum
pay and benefits. AFTRA has approved an Interactive Media Agreement to cover
on- and off-camera performers on all interactive media platforms.

The AFTRA and SAG contracts are lengthy and detailed. Both share
language and job descriptions (such as principal, voice-over performer, extra,
singer, and dancer). Also, both unions have approximately the same wage scales
for these jobs. Table 11-1 shows the Screen Actors Guild categories for interactive
media work and rates. Of course, an actor can always negotiate more than
minimum wage.

If your talent needs are simple, you can usually get good contract advice directly
from the union representative in your area or from the actors themselves. If your
needs are elaborate or undefined, you may wish to consult an attorney or agent
who specializes in this area and who can oversee the many required clauses and
details of the contract.

Acquiring Releases

A union talent contract explicitly states what rights you have to the
still and motion images and voices you make and use. If, however, your
talent is nonunion (a co-worker, perhaps, or a neighbor’s child, student
actor, waitress, or tugboat captain), be sure to require the person to sign
a release form. This form grants to you certain permissions and speci-
fies the terms under which you can use the material you make during a
recording session.
A sample release form that covers most situations in
a multimedia project and provides nearly perfect rights to the producer.
Because such forms are legal documents, always consult an attorney to be
sure that the specific language of your own release document meets your
requirements. For more about video and music releases and sample forms,
check out www.current.tv/make/resources.