week 8 -sarah,daniel,samuel

In order to create a multimedia project, the developer needs to follow a series of steps from the Idea Analysis till the Delivery stage. This is to ensure that the project or material results in good quality due to careful planning and taking strategic measures throughout the process.

Idea Analysis is the first step to developing any multimedia project. This is where you write your idea down on paper, and decide on the purpose and message of your project. You will need to and weigh the cost and measures it will take in order to make your idea a success. There must be a balance between purpose and feasibility which can be done by increasing or decreasing multimedia elements depending on what is relevant to the project at hand.

You will need to think about the content materials and hardware that is needed and how you may obtain them if you don’t already have them. Research is needed to check if your idea is original or if it has already been used in the multimedia market. How big your project is will determine the amount of space you will need in order to store your raw material and later on the finished product. Necessary time and money are also important factors to consider before continuing your project.

Pre-development stage is where you take your details to the next step. Define your project goals specifically and each skill needed to make it attainable. Then a content outline needs to be sketched or written out. This provides a guideline for you to follow as you develop your project further in case you forget any important ideas, or it could help inspire new ones along the way. A strategic positioning and marketing plan is needed in order to place your multimedia project in the correct target market. Create your prototype on paper so that a visible outline or illustration of your project is available for viewing when dealing with sales and marketing people.

Prototype development makes itself as the next stage for creating the concept of the project. For starters, creating screen mock-ups just to get the rough idea of the overview of how your project is going to look like. Similarly to creating a skeleton of a website, designing the content map will guide users in navigating themselves through the multimedia project and interacting with the option tools available. When designing human interface, consider making a layout that is not cluttered and user friendly. When developing the content messages of your project, ensure that you text is grammatically correct, straightforward and easy to understand. Finally test the prototype that you have done in order to troubleshoot. This trial and error process is necessary at every stage at save you the trouble of correcting error in the long run.

Alpha development is the stage where you draw out your storyboard and flowcharts in detail. Include the finalized story scripts as well. Graphic art should be chosen to suit the idea and concept of the project. It plays an important part in giving the overall feel of the project to appeal to your target market. Including sound and video in your project will enhance usability and optimize the options for interaction. For example, if it’s an educational multimedia project, a video tutorial would explain your content better than just an audio player and will be more interesting than text because it allows demonstrations. In the process of putting all these elements together, you might face minor technical problems. Solve all technical problems and test prototype once again before moving to the next stage.

Beta development is one step before the final delivery stage. Your project is sent out to a limited list of users who will test your program or project in case you might have missed out any details. Your project should be usable on the proposed delivery platform. In testing the program, respond to bug reports from the computer. Analyze the scripting code error and fix it. You should also prepare a user document to make your program user-friendly. This can be in a hardcopy format of a program manual, or a softcopy document made available in the file. Design the packaging for your project according to what is suitable. Create a range of varied gold candidates of your project so that one may be chosen as the gold master copy. Once that is done, inform PR personnel so a press release may be written to launch your new program or project.

Delivery is the final stage where you prepare technical support for your project in case of any malfunctions. Install a sales team to support your launch and make replicates of your gold master copy. Hold launch seminars to further promote the newly launched program. Finally, arrange to ship your products to various companies who have requested it.

week 9 -canaan,alvin,sim pin

How will the content be delivered?
User need to gain authorized rights to public display to multimedia content that owned by another party, this rights come in terms of the method to deliver the content in what media and what way the user want it to be display.

Is that license for a set period of time?
License for copyright is being set for a due date. Once the copyright date come to a due, the particular individual or company cannot publish or use the content of the owner anymore. To use the content again, user need to gain another license to use it for the time to come.

Is the license exclusive or non-exclusive?
License involving copyright in terms of exclusive or not make sure that the owner sells the rights to a party or to others party at the same time. To avoid misunderstanding among the user and owner, agreement is achieved to clarify the copyright issues. When AIG’s associated company- AIA sells the right to Korea government to publish the health assurance project in South Korea by the year 2005. Due to the political position, North Korea government claimed that it is not right as there are the one who already had the right since 2003, however, AIG make a clear statement that this copy right is a non-exclusive to North Korea only.

Do you intend to use the material in its entirety or just a portion of it?
Agreement need to be obtained whether the owner allows how many parts or whole parts of the content being use by the buyers. Buyer need to follow the agreement made to use the multimedia content.

What rights do you need?
This rights including the rights of copying, changing, selling or public display the multimedia content that the buyer had bought. The owner had the authority to state whether the user allows changing their content or not allowing doing so. In 2004, Arsenal F.C. allow the Emirates flight company to display the pictures of their football stars in the plane, however, assuming that Arsenal F.C. allowing them to do whatever they want with the pictures, Emirates display the players pictures by adding Arabian country background and surrounded by few others crew. Arsenal F.C. claimed that they only allow Emirates Flight Company to display the PLAIN player’s picture.

Does the content owner have the authority to assign rights to you?
Owner has the right to assign and stated terms and conditions apply to the content in terms of authority over the user in the whole process of usage.

Will the copyright owner receive remuneration for the license?
The owner will asked for commission payment for their products in term of one shot payment, by sales of the product sold, by percentage of usage and etc.

In what format do you wish to receive the content?
Agreement had to achieve in what method user which to receive the multimedia content. By soft copy, hard copy, advertisement and etc. For examples, In Summer 2006, CNN Company had managed to gain copyright to published NY Yankees baseball team news exclusively by receiving the first hand news daily through person in charge. In this case, CNN receive the content in news form through the necessary methods and ways.

week 9 -adriel,amanda,nicole

For obtaining rights to multimedia contents, the first thing that should be considered is the ways and means to deliver the content. For example, will your content be delivered in a CD-ROM or a web site. The following issue to consider is if the license applied for is for a set of period of time. If so, how long is it? This is important as once the license expires, the right no longer belongs to you if you do not renew it immediately. The next issue is if the license is exclusive or non-exclusive to applicants to these rights. If your content arrangement is done out of the ordinary, it can be an exclusive right only to you. Whereas, some rights obtained are non-exclusive. It is important to know these license right because should there be an infringement done, you have the advantage of gaining compensation.

Do you intent to use the material its entirely? For this, the user must decide if he or she would like to use the copyrighted material entirely or just a small portion of it. As both in comparision, if the user would like to use the material entirely he would pay the payment of the copyright to use it much more higher.

For example, using a full photography of a landscape of the mountain taken by a photographer then the fee paid for the photograph would be higher than the usual fee paid for a small portion.

The rights that the user need is when asking the original user permission to use their copyright item or trademark. This rights includes for own use such as presentation, to reproduce or for reselling. For example, UTAR is being given a permission to reproduce their logo from Nike's global tick. Then, UTAR is able to reproduce their logo without being sued by other counter parties.

The content owner have the authority to assign rights to the new user as the content owner is the sole creator who gives birth to the idea first. This is to avoid being sued by the third party using it without the consent of the first owner or creator.

When negotiating for rights, one also has to take into consideration that there may be additional rights he or she has to obtain before he can use the content. Meaning that there may be other owners of the same content that have rights over it and that should it be utilized by anyone, they also have to be consulted with. Examples would be like using a film or a song. For a movie there are more than one person working on it; there are directors, producers, screenwriters, etc. As such one would have to negotiate not just with the director, but with the producer and screenwriter as well. Same too goes for a song; a singer may be the one to approach but one also has to consider the production house in which the artist or singer was working for as they may also hold rights to the song.

While negotiating, bringing up the issue as to whether the copyright owner will receive payment is also vital. A holder of a copyright may be willing to allow a person to use his/her video,sound,picture, or music but he/she may want something in return. They may want payment by royalty or one time pay but either way things like these must be negotitated and decided before utiliztion.

Lastly, is the matter of which format a person is wanting to receive the content in. Whether a person wants a soft copy or a hard copy is decided and negotiated here.

A person may have peferences as to how he wants his contents to be. He may want a movie that is the original copy of the copyright holder, or picutres in a CD-rom or through websites.

week 9 assessment

When negotiating for rights to using multimedia content, there are many issues that have to be considered. Discuss these issues.

week 8 -adriel,amanda,nicole

For every project that is to be done, planning is a definite pre-requisite. In fact, the planning process is considered the most vital process to make a project successful. This applies to the IT and multimedia industry as well.

There are five processes in the making multimedia. The first is process or step is Idea Analysis. In this process, it is important to weigh the ideas thought of and consider its feasibility, cost of production and delivery. This is because if the idea is not feasible, you may be in the middle of your project and finally realize that it is impossible for the project to be completed. This results in loss of time and energy.

A way to weigh your ideas is to jot it down- it is very useful to have notes around so that when a new idea hits you, it can be jot down immediately. Making notes is also useful because you will be able to write down the pros and cons of your idea. This makes the first process much easier.

Asking yourself questions will also make the idea clearer. Examples of questions will be “How can you organize your project?”, “What multimedia elements (text, sounds and visuals) will best deliver your message?”, etc.

The second process is the pre-development process that is a pre-requisite before developing multimedia. In this process, it is important to define the project goals. Defining the goals is important because goals will keep you focused on the purpose of the project and it saves time. It is also important to define the skill set needs required like the type of software available for use. Then, it is the creation of content online that furthers strengthens the goals set. It gives a clearer picture of the project. Next thing is to position sales and marketing so to prepare the public to accept and receive your multimedia project. It is also good to create prototype on a paper.

The next development is the prototype development. In this process, screen mock-ups are build so that a rough idea is given and more ideas for improvement can be generated. Then, there is the designing of content maps and human interface. After that, the story and message develop. Lastly, it is important to test the prototype. Should it be faulty, it is important to review and analyze the whole planning process to rectify the problem.

During the prototype development designing is the main agenda. Here, developers would build screen mock-ups where is it a model to be seen as a reference. Next, they design content maps which works like a site map to guide them through. Then, they design human interface such as buttons for a better navigation to communicate the subject to their target audience. Later, they develop the story or the messages they would like to portray. Lastly, they test out the prototype.

The development moves on towards the alpha development when the developer finds no defect on the prototype development. There would be a focus group to evaluate and report and if there is any revision made, they would go back to the previous development.

During alpha development, there would be detailed storyboards and flowcharts to be charted out as to see where the whole project is is going and giving a clearer picture. Next, developer would finalize story scripts. Then produce graphic art, sound and video related to the topic of the development. The developers too solve out technical problems faced and test working the prototype. If there is no other problems involved they would bail out and reach out to the next development step.

One clear example is www.friendster.com main page; it has changed from the alpha development to the beta development with a change of features on the main page.

During the beta development, the project will be distributed to a limited number of testers to further check and perhaps add input on what else should be done. At this time, bugs can also be reported and then accordingly dealt with by the creators, should there be any.

Without any guides for their products that they are selling, it would be useless to users. So it is in this stage of development that user’s guides or manuals be produced to guide and give information to users as to how to operate or use the project. Packaging is also important in this stage as it is sometimes, if not most of the times the part that convinces and persuades users to use or buy the project.

Special or gold candidates are also found at this stage. These candidates are actually various version of the product. Examples are like versions 1.0 to 1.3 to 2.0 to 2.1, and so on. From these versions, developers can gauge how well the project has been done and which one should go out to be sold and used. Special candidates are therefore essential to the development and the success of the whole project. Finally in the beta development, advertising through press releases, announcements to various press associations, and PR lists are done. Exposure of the project is a must and these PR activities are the best ways to get that type of exposure to the public.

Delivery is the final stage of the whole development and the first one would be the preparing of a technical support team who will be ever ready to answer any questions or inquiries from customers and also to aid them with the product/project. A sales team is also set up here. These are the ones who will do the disseminating of the product to put it into the hands of people. They also are the ones who will garner profits and revenue from selling the product.

The gold master, which is the final version of the project, is now mass produced to be sold. The gold master comes under this development and will be what the product really looks like. A launch seminar is also given at this stage. This is the time where the lime light now shines on the product and is finally introduced to the world. With that, the product is now ready to be shipped to different countries all around the world to be used and enjoyed.

week 8 -sim pin,alvin,canaan

There are many steps in the process of making multimedia. This process is one of the project planning. Project planning is important because there are some tasks like building blocks of project management and pre-requisites must be completed before other begins. The steps in the process of making multimedia included Idea Analysis, Pre-development, Prototype Development, Alpha Development, Beta Development, and Delivery.

The first step in the process is Idea Analysis. Weight your idea against the feasibility and cost of production and delivery. Through the whole project, you need to organize the project to deliver your purpose and message. After that, make a draft for the project by using note paper and scratch pads to write down the idea. In this step, you need to maintain balance between purpose and feasibility by dynamically adding and subtracting multimedia elements. You must plan your time management and money for the project also.

Then you come into the step of Pre-development which you need to define the project goals and skillset needs, create content outline and prototype on paper, and also position in sales and marketing. You need to list down the multimedia elements and content material which you need to leverage your project. However, in prototype development, you need to build screen mock-ups, design content maps, design human interface, and develop story or message. When you finish these step, you need to test the prototype.

After that, you come into Alpha Development and Beta Development. These are the last steps before you deliver your project. In Alpha Development, you must detail the storyboard and flowcharts, finalize story scripts, and produce the multimedia elements. For example, video tape, music, documents, photographs, advertisements and others. Besides, hardware and software which available for the development has been chosen also. Thus, in Beta Prototype, you must distribute to limited tester list, respond to bug reports, prepare user documentation, prepare packaging, develop gold candidates, announce to press and PR lists.

After all those steps, you can deliver your project. When you deliver your project, you must prepare the technical support, install sales team, replicate gold master, hold launch seminar, and ship product.

week 8 assessment

Discuss the process of multimedia project management from Idea Analysis, Pre-development, Prototype Development, Alpha Development, Beta Development to Delivery.