Planning and Roughs

Here are a few guidelines for your rough plans, please note that there are no right of wrong ways of going about planning your interactive CD-ROMs. You must do your planning as you feel works best for you. DO NOT go down the road of fabricating your planning at the end of the project. The planning, research and tests you do will provide you with an insight into what Director can provide and what has already been done. Use your Easter break well and you can be ready to put your project together after the break.



- Bullet point synopsis of what the Interactive CD-ROM is about. This should be 1 Page and no more

- Critical analysis of the finished piece. What are the good points and what parts could be recreated and improved? How could they be improved? This should obviously be conducted after the CD-ROM is finished. It should be 1 Page and no more.

- Design for screen shots of the project. These need only be rough pencil sketches. This could be almost like a storyboard, maybe divide a sheet of A4 into 4 or 6 squares and use a square for each screen. It would be useful to have just a single line of text under each sketch describing the screen shot in terms of its relevance and interactivity.

- A picture map of the presentation. This should show each of the screen shots and their relationship to one another. For example starting with the introductory screen you will have a single option to go to the menu screen. From the menu screen you will have multiple options branching off. Again this could be in the form of rough sketches of each of the pages. You might also want to recreate this with screen shots from the final CD-ROM in order to compare the rough designs and the finished article.

- A series of screen shots of the finished CD-ROM. This could be in the form of a single screen shot per A4 sheet of paper or you might prefer to have 2 per sheet. Either way you should write directions for each screen shot regarding how the navigation and interaction work. It is quite alright to make these notes hand written. For example: The mouse rolls over the blue button and the title of the section it links to is displayed.


These are simply guidelines and you are free to add to this as you wish. If this format is not appropriate to your project then find one that works better. My advice is to get the planning stage out of the way by the time you return to University after the Easter break. This might only take a few days to complete so please do try to get it out of the way. Once it is finished you can progress quicker with the practical Director work.



Good luck and have a great Easter break

Darren