Paul's Blog 07017421: 11th Entry

Today’s lecture was the last lecture of 2007. Unsurprisingly, being the last lecture before Christmas and having to wait 3 hours in between lectures, not many people showed up!

The lecture was about multimedia project management, a very large subject so there was a lot to get though. Geneen went though it a million miles per hour because everyone wanted to get home for Christmas. Well almost everyone, I stayed for one more day and left on Saturday so I could have one more night with my flat mates and a very insane night it was too! Luckily Geneen put the notes on Blackboard so we didn’t need to make notes as fast as she talked!

Multimedia project management involves 6 main stages – building a team, defining the project stages, concept development, pre-production, production and testing.

Before you begin the project, you need to build a team. Important members of the team include the project manager, technical lead, web developers and designs. Extended team members include the account manager, programmers, and testers and evaluators.

The general project stages include analyse, design, develop, implement and evaluate. These are key stages the project can be divided into each containing different aims, objectives and tasks to be completed before moving onto the next stage.

Concept development basically involves finding out what tasks need addressing. This stage involves writing out a project proposal and specification outlining what you need to complete the project, who the product is aimed at and what the product is designed for. You need to answer numerous questions such as what the product is designed to do, who is your target audience and what are the competitive products and services already available in the marketplace. You also need to answer what is different about your approach, why people will come back to your product and where you will get your content.

The next stage is pre production involving a heck of a lot of stages! Basically it involves designing each and every aspect of the product from the navigation to the audio. You also need to find out what you need for the product and how you are going to get it.

Next you proceed to production. In this stage you need to create everything you have outlined and to specification. During this stage you need to make sure everything is organised and monitor the project to ensure everything is going to plan. You also need to insure that potential things that could go wrong are limited as much as possible.

Next is testing, checking what you have got and ensuring it matches specification. To do this you need to use the product like a user would documenting all the bugs found and ensuring they are fixed. You need to perform both configuration testing and functionality testing. Once all this is completed the product is ready to be released to the product.

The final stage is cleanup and archiving. This involves deleting what is no longer required and archiving what is still important. You should have all you need to re-complete the project in the future.

Well that’s it. Quite a hefty subject but I’m sure it will have use in industry making the process a lot clearer and more effective. At the bottom of this post is a link to some project management sources (1) thought I might as well include it here since I might need to use it one day! See you in 2008!

Today’s tutorial, the first of 2008, was about Photoshop. Quite a nice surprise because I’ve used Photoshop before but didn’t know it was being covered in this module. Photoshop is one of those programs that’s insanely powerful and unless you’re a complete expert at Photoshop who has dedicated years to understanding it you only feel like your only scratching the surface. I’ve used Photoshop before to create and edit graphics for websites only using the core features but its nice to that it can do so much more if required. It’s fun to experiment with some of the advanced tools and features just to see what they do and how powerful they really are. In the tutorial we learnt about the features involving selecting and moving. I’ve only previously used the magic wand tool which was able to do everything I needed but it’s nice to use all the other features so you know where they are if you should need them. To perform this exercise we moved various pieces of fruit and veg onto a melon to create a face. Below is my finished result. Rather fetching don’t you think? Kind of got that serial killer look in his eyes, or maybe that’s just me! I’ve included a link at the bottom of this post (2) containing some tutorials of some text effects I’ve used.