Pre-production techniques for creative media industries
Unit 1: Procedure and Documentation.
-Jack Swift
Procedure-
Identifying the finance: available, is knowing your budget
and how to manage your budget, during development the budget will need to be
separated and managed throughout all areas of development form software to
hardware, and things such as personnel and locations, costs of travelling to
certain places. You will also need money for advertisement of your game, these
can come in forms of posters which will cost but will not be too expensive, or
a TV advert which will also cost money and will be more expensive.
Identifying personnel: needed is also important, certain
people for certain jobs or specialists, will require payment for their work.
The availability of these specialists may not always be around, and will be
costly to hire. With standard personnel things have to be considered such as
whether they will be able to arrive for work, if they cannot arrive at work
some days then production will be jeopardised.
Resources: such as software and availability of things such
as specialists, availability of places for research such, for example with a
racing game the development team may want to research a certain race track
however the track may not be available to research. As well as hiring locations
out, things such as swords, guns , cars, or planes may be hired out depending
on what your game includes, if you needed to hire out a certain car for your
game you would have to see whether you would be able to afford the hiring fee
as well as if it is available
Preparing a budget: is an important step that, knowing how
much money you have to spend and preparing it by separating for different needs
a budget will be needed for the software and hardware side of things. And a
budget will be needed to pay personnel, having the budget prepared and knowing
how the money will be distributed will prevent panics when there is not enough
money for something. It is important to examine and maintain your budget as
going over your budget will not only cost you or your company money but if the
game is not successful then money would have been wasted as no profit was made.
Contact personnel: is need for when personnel do cannot or
do not turn up for production, or if they quit production a back up is needed,
however in a case of personnel quitting production you would be informed of
their leave, and would have time to find a new person to fill in for them, however
if a member of the production does not turn up due to illness or other matters,
someone will be needed to fill in his role, this is a problem if someone
important such as a production manager cannot come in As you may not be able to
find someone to fill in his role.
Prepare schedule: almost all productions and projects have
schedules for finishing/releases . the prepare schedule is important to know
what parts of your production are doing well and if any have not, prepare
schedules can work on how much development has been achieved in a certain time
period, by knowing how well your project is doing in terms of development, will
give you an idea of when the project will be finished, and have a good idea of
when your project will be released.
Identifying the health and safety concerns: The safety of
your employees is the most important thing during the entire production and is
the first thing to be considered at the start of production. If the health or
safety of your employees is at risk then the project will be halted, or in
serious cases can shut down the project for a certain period of time to review
the conditions of the workplace.
Indentifying legal aspects:
The project does have to abide by the law; this includes things such as
copyright infringement, and other legal aspects. It is important for your
employees to know all of the legal aspects of production as not to break them,
as this could cause the entire project to be halted or even ended.
Other risks: It is important to have minimal risks as possible,
this not only keep the project safe from being
halted or stopped, but also
keeps the employees safe and comfortable which will not affect their work,
however employees may feel uncomfortable or unsafe their work may become poor
due to them not wanting to work in a dangerous environment. Other risks in the
work place that need to be known are things such as, wires, long screen hours
is bad for the eye sight and regular breaks should be taken, having food and
drinks near electrical equipment etc.
My procedure: For my
maze game I will have a weekly procedure of tasks and sub-assignments set by
myself which I will aim to complete, The maze game I will be making has a
deadline in December, This gives me just under two months complete the game, I
will stage my game into certain sections, one for level design and character
design, another section for sounds and music etc. The resources i will need
will mostly be illustrator software and gamemaker which the entire game will be
made on. There will be no cost to the resources I will use as all the software
is provided free by the college, however if I were in a company I would have to
set aside money for software for other computers for my team. I will not be
researching places which cost nor will I be booking resources or places. I will
not have any employed personnel during the making of my game, but may at times
ask for assistance in software I am not used to. I will need to identify the
health and safety risks so I know how to avoid them, I will need to identify
the legal aspects as well such as copyright, I will have to check my characters
and plot to make sure I am not copying other projects, I need to get owner’s
permission of certain things such as music, however if I or someone else makes
the music and soundtracks I do not need permission, or the owner of the music
may choose to donate the music for free to the game. Financially I will not
require any finance or budget as the equipment and software I will be using is
either already owned or is provided for free by the college, in case something
does need to be purchased it most likely will not be expensive and will not
require a budget. I will not need contact personnel as i have no extra
personnel other than myself on the project.
Documentation
Production such as a script, storyboard, mood board,
production schedule: having a script, storyboard. A production schedule is
needed to keep the game stable, by following a schedule you can never go off
track and can keep up with production, A script or storyboard is the heart of
the game, this is a necessity for your game, as the game is built around a
storyboard. A mood board is useful as it can sums up all of your ideas simply
and shows in clearly, during production you can then use this mood board when
going off track of what originally was thought up.
Budget: The budget is funding for the project which
financially does not come from the developers but is either loaned, or received
in a contract. If the budget is not handled well or the project goes over
budget then the money will come from the head of development personally. The
budget is used to start the project going.
Clearances: clearances are the legal sides of the
development/production, these are things such as using someone’s music for your
project they can give the song to you for free, or it will come at a charge. If
the owner of a piece of work does not want it in your game or you cannot pay
the charge to put it in your game, then the work legally is not allowed in you r game, if it is still implemented in
your game this is copyright infringement and is illegal.
Plans: Most projects have future plans for areas such as
finance, designs and scripting. Plans are there for you to follow during the
development so you can keep on track on relative to what you want the game to
be, you could also add to your plans when looking back on them.
H&S assessment/ risk assessment: this is important to
your employees, they must know all the risks and how to avoid them or what to
do encase of an accident, for example if there is a fire then the employees
need to know where to go such as fire escapes, exits and where to go after a
fire.
Contingency plan: Contingency plans are simply a backup plan
if things go wrong, things that can jeopardise the production can be file data
corrupted or missing, or legal aspects which have halted production. The
contingency plan can help by having a backup files in a secure place.
