Today's lecture

This blog post is to summarise and reflect on today's lecture about the interactive media industry.

You may have seen that earlier I blogged an example assignment brief. This is because lately we have been learning about how to understand elements in the industry that we are hopefully going to make a career out of.

For an assignment set by a company, the following are key points to address before even considering actually making the product. The following stages are for when you have pitched and got a project to work on.

• Research the audience. A key step in creating your multimedia product will be to research your audience, in fact you will probably spend more time planning the product and time on research than you will actually creating the product. If you are doing work for a larger company they will probably have sufficient audience research of which you can use, otherwise you will have to do this yourself. The key points in defining the audience you are looking to aim for will include knowing what pshycographic and demographic profiles the clients' product is for.

A little more information is needed to explain the profiles of potential audiences. A demographic    profile means knowing the age group, gender, culteral background and economic social classes people fit in to. A pshycographic means knowing about the personality of those people. This is things such as what are their interests? What products have they previously used? When and where do they like to use them? What kind of person are they?

• Another stage relating to research will include researching exisitng products. You can gain research for existing products and research for audience profiles by contacting other companies who have this information or doing it yourself. The drawback of contacting another company is that they will probably want money for their research work, but also doing this yourself takes more time out of your schedule.
• Find out what budget you will be working to. Also what will you be signing? Will you have to provide more elements of the project, cutting into your profit, or will the company you are creating the product for provide these elements.
• The schedule. How much time do you have to complete this project? Make sure when you make any deadlines that you can abide by them; if you miss a deadline you will have to pay compansation fees and you will  have the title of 'unreliable' attached.
• The above two points make up the most part of the contract. Once you sign a contract to do a job by a certain date for a specified budget, you have to work to this. As mentioned before if you do not complete the project sufficiently for the deadline it will cost you dearly in money and reputation.
• The creation stage begins.

To expand on the points covered, the reason that the time schedule and budget are two of the main parts of the project specification because if they go wrong, the project can fall to pieces. For example if a company who makes deodrant for instance is set to release their deodrant product in a month and you have been asked to create a website for them and finish it two days before the release of the product, if you are late the marketing campaign can fail. Or say another deodrant company is to release their product on the same day and you fail to meet your deadline, that competitive company will already have the upper hand, meaning that the company you are working for has lost out on much profit.

In terms of the project budget, this can differ in relation to the size of the project and your previous experience can all change the hourly rate that you get paid. For example a student doing a website for a local B&B would probably get on average £30 a day, working an 8 hour day. A proffessional web designer who has completed larger projects in the past and has wealth of expierience in their field will probably earn aroun £70 an hour, or more. So you can see the differences in relationship to the type of project/client you are dealing with and your experience also.

Much of what I have talked about in this blog post will become all the more relevant to me later on once proceeding into the industry, but also in more recent times as our class have been told we will have client based work to complete later on this year. This means completing work for clients for a set deadline and possibly a set budget. The reason it is in some cases more important is because it is not a college briefed assignment, basically if we mess it up it will be our reputation on the line. My lecturer also suggested that if we get too many jobs to do in the future, or a job that is too advanced for us then you can hand it on to another person or company, but shadow that company. Meaning that you follow what they are doing every step of the way, acting as a superb learning tool, learning from proffessionals to boost our own knowledge.