Mini Assignments #4

The Assignment

To write a script for a short informational multimedia production in which your reader/viewer/actor experiences meaningful interaction and reaches an objective. You may choose any subject you like for your script. No more prescribed scenarios!

You should integrate at least four of the following elements: sound (for example, sound effects, music, spoken word), moving and/or still pictures, text, graphics and animation. You may integrate any additional elements that you choose.

You should use the two-column script format or the development of it applied to the museum kiosk study, Chapter 14.

As this assignment is worth 15% of your final grade, you need to write slightly more than the five pages or so of the video script. However, as every minute of production time requires quite extensive writing, I recommend that you choose to inform or teach your reader/viewer/actor about a relatively small, self-contained object or process.

You could choose something as simple as interactive instructions for making toast or operating a new version of an ATM or changing a car tire (please, someone help me with this one) or creating an interactive 'Help' section for a tricky computer operation.

Keep the objective simple, and pour your inventiveness into your interactive enactment of the task. Here's the essential reference checklist for this assignment:-

Garrand, Writing for Multimedia and the Web, pp. 67 - 72, plus the detailed case studies you read in the informational multimedia section of the book.&

Good Luck!

• to blend coherently and constructively multiple media elements
• to maintain high-quality, active, precise writing in both the descriptive and active elements of your script.
• to practice the use of the two-column scripting format and adapt it to the scripting of interactive informational multimedia
• to practice the scripting of reader/viewer/actor interaction

Remember:

1) Define your target audience at the beginning of your script.

2) Each script requires a 'hook,' a dazzling idea or promise to pull the reader/viewer/actor into your scenario. Even in instructional or informational multimedia, when the audience may have an imperative practical reason (need for knowledge now!) for using your production, you must quickly entice it into the world you are creating.

3) Every element you include must have a purpose: to inform or teach, of course, but also to seduce, to entertain, to establish your personal creative approach to the objective, to suggest a mood or an attitude of mind, to prompt the reader/viewer/actor to action, etc.