MIS 218A

Multimedia for the Web

Andy Stokes

Week 1

Week 1

• Syllabus

• Attendance Policy– Attend Every Class– Snow

• Expectations– Mine and Yours

What is Multimedia?

What is Multimedia?

• Focus is digital

• What are types of media?

• Business vs. Personal

• How do we do it?

Where do we see multimedia?

• On the net, of course

• Where else?

Delivery Methods

• Online vs. Offline

Historical Context

• Still relatively new• CD-Rom specification published in 1985• CD drives in desktop computers in 1989• WWW publicly available in 1992• HTML 3.2 specification adopted by W3C in

early 1997• XHTML 1.0 specification adopted in Fall

2000

More History

• First films for public consumption shown in Paris in 1895

• Silent films

• “The Jazz Singer”

• “Toy Story” and “Gladiator”

Multimedia Production

• Authoring systems– Adobe authoring tools– Macromedia tools

Different typesDifferent tools

• Films and movies have a definite division of labor– Foleys– Grips– Director– Producer– Camera Operators

• Authoring systems tend to blur the tools and tasks

Films and Multimedia

• Elements must be storyboarded!– Lends continuity– Helps to visualize action and interaction

• Linear vs Non-linear

Terminology

Terminology

• Words we use to talk about multimedia– Lack of terms demonstrates immaturity and

newness of multimedia

• How we interact– Read– Look at– Watch– Listen to

More terminology

• User

• Modalities

So what is multimedia?

Digital MultimediaAny combination of two or more media,

represented in a digital form, sufficiently well integrated to be presented via a single interface, or manipulated by a single computer program

Interactivity

Things to ponder

• “You can mistake endless choice for freedom” – Bruce Springsteen, Dec 1998

• “Interactivity empowers the end users of your project by letting them control the content and flow of information.” – Tay Vaughan, Multimedia: Making It Work

Choices

Appropriateness

• Is multimedia the way to go for everything?

• Should everything be interactive?

User Interfaces

• Novel?

• Formal?

Social and Ethical Considerations

Technology is neither good nor evil.

In certain cases though, the introduction of technology can present opportunities for behaviors that were not there before. Certain ethical problems caused by those behaviors can be described as arising from particular technological innovations

Controls

Control of Consumption

• Lowest common denominator vs High end

• Broadband vs Dial-up

• Basic computer literacy

• Physical disabilities and learning difficulties

Control of Production

• Anybody with access to the internet can have their own site and those without can’t.

• Means of production of traditional media are tightly controlled – ever try to publish a book on your own?

• The web makes it easy to publish your manifesto or other work

• These principles apply to film and music too

Control of Multimedia

• Some sites get more of our attention than others

• Companies that control older media also control the multimedia

Control of content

• We still have bad stuff

• In print

• In music

• In film

• In multimedia

Where are we now?

Our History and Future

• We started with text, moved to browsers that were capable of just text, then on to browsers capable of displaying text and images.

• Now we have applications designed just for the delivery of multimedia and plugins that put that multimedia in the browser with text and images

• What next?