Project Development Cycle
The iMedia course gives you a good idea of the processes involved in any multimedia project such as videos, animations, websites, sounds, comic strips and graphics. Such projects follow a development cycle with 5 main stages - these stages sometimes have different names but the idea is the same (see image). You don't actually need to know about the project development cycle and stages for the iMedia course but I find it helps understand how all the tasks and documents fit together.
Define Stage
This is where you understand what the project is about. It is where you will analyse the audience and purpose and examine existing products to help you identify what should be included, and typical layouts, content and composition. For our projects this will specifically include:
- Graphic Properties (resolution and appropriate file types / compression)
- Designing Colour schemes
- Graphic Composition "rules"
- Website content
- Comic history and layout
Design Stage
On multimedia products there are a number of documents that help at this stage they are know as pre-production documents and include:
There are also other tools and skills that are useful in this stage:
- Work plans (time plan / project plan)
- Shoot planning ( needed for any video or photography work)
On most projects there are more technical decisions made here too such as:
- Choosing appropriate file types
- When to use compression on files and what type of compression to use
- Selecting appropriate hardware and software
Develop Stage
This is where you actual make the products using your software skills. Note on the projects you will need to evidence how you have made something, highighting the skills you have used.
Test stage (or evaluate stage)
There are four parts to this:
- Does the product technically function - for example does the video play, do images display correctly etc. (testing)
- Does the product meet the requirements outlined in the brief - does it do what it is meant to (evaluation)
- How could the product be improved to make it better - what can you tweak to what you have already included (improvements)
- What else could be added to the product in future to make it better and more suitable for the clients needs (product development)
Its worth noting that one of the big mark exam questions you will get relates directly to this phase - analyse how suitable a given pre production document. They will give you an example and you will need to write about it. This page shows you a good approach to these questions.
Deploy Stage
This is where the product is "made live", given to the customer, you won't do much in this phase for your projects, other than make sure you have final versions of the products in suitable forms.