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Introduction
Multimedia involves using design and programming skills and digital technology to create interactive outcomes that combine sound, text and images. To complete this unit, you'll learn how to respond to multimedia briefs, and develop your skills and understanding by analysing existing multimedia products and exploring digital techniques and technology.
Developing ideas and outcomes to meet multimedia briefs
Multimedia products can be educational, entertaining or informative. To meet a multimedia brief, you may want to develop a website, CD-Rom or a presentation. You'll start by asking questions such as:
- What is the target market for the product?
- What are the needs and preferences of the target market?
- What message(s) or information do you want to communicate?
- What technical factors will you take into account, e.g. method of reproduction or display, number of colours, resolution, use of logo or links with other products?
- What can you learn from similar commercial projects?
You will then have to choose suitable materials, techniques and processes to meet your purpose. You'll need to:
- consider alternative options
- explore properties, characteristics, effects, uses, limitations and creative potential
- discuss why some materials and techniques are more suitable than others.
Try this
- Choose a multimedia product that you like, such as a website or CD-Rom, and analyse it using the questions listed above to determine how the product meets the needs of its market.
- Using the same product, consider how you could achieve its aims using different formats, characteristics, effects, etc. If you were designing this product, how would you change it?
- Draft out ideas for your own multimedia product. What would your product aim to do? Who will use it? Why would people want to use it?
Using multimedia products
If a multimedia product is going to be successful, it needs to be easy for the target audience to use. Think about the following questions in relation to websites and CD-Roms that you use:
- Who are they aimed at and how do you know that this is the target audience?
- How are text, sound and image presented and navigated?
- How accessible is the information to different user groups?
- What is meant by 'usability'?
Try this
Look again at your chosen multimedia product and evaluate it according to these questions:
- Who will use this product?
- Which presentation and navigation techniques are particularly successful?
- Which presentation and navigation techniques could be improved?
- Which user groups might find this product hard to use and why?
- How usable is this product to a general audience with a moderate level of IT awareness?
Using digital techniques and technology.
To develop multimedia products you need to be familiar with digital techniques and processes. These include:
- input devices, e.g. video, scanners and digital photography
- software tools, e.g. for image manipulation and video-editing
- sound and music, e.g. recording, sampling and editing
- buttons to link frames and start actions, e.g. sound files, video clips or animation sequences
- interfaces, e.g. scripting techniques, web authoring and multimedia authoring
- design techniques, e.g. system diagrams for prototypes, flowcharts for mapping out user navigation.
Try this
- Make a list of the techniques and technology you would need to develop your own product. Which techniques are you already familiar with? If there are new techniques that you haven't used previously, how will you learn these? Who will help you to develop your skills?
