As with any other emerging industry, it is important to settle on a workable definition and scoping of the domain under review. The term "interactive multimedia" [IMM] is often used more as a set of descriptors for content than it is to define a product in its own right. As practitioners tell us, it is a broad domain:
"Digital Media: - Creative works which employ computer technology to enable the production, distribution and sharing of ideas."
David Cox, Film-maker and video game producer.
"It's about the way we deal with information in all its forms: film, television books, communications."
Russell Yardley, training and education provider and education
title developer and distributor
Interactive multimedia involves people communicating with people, aided by machines. It is more than just people interacting with machines. Certainly interactive multimedia requires a digital intermediate form to be established for content derived from any medium, be it text, data, audio, graphics, or video animation. In its current state of development, IMM products mainly appear as CD-ROM discs that are played on personal computers with colour screens, sound cards, hard disk and CD-ROM drives. However, IMM is fast becoming network based, using global data networks that link computer with computer, and thus user with user.
Most importantly, interactive multimedia products define both the content and the context in which the user can find, manipulate and interpret informative, educational and entertaining material. The power of presenting content in this way to a user is as much in the associations and relationships, and the logic of interaction between users and the material, as it is in the notion of "more than one medium". We find leading examples of such power in the entertainment worlds of computer games and virtual reality today, which can also be exponents of enjoyable learning and information-rich experiences.
Any assessment of interactive multimedia industries needs to recognise that the combination of entertainment, information and education is a phenomenon of considerable potential power that builds upon and extends traditional content industries. This characteristic of interactive multimedia is illustrated by the unusually diverse set of disciplines required for successful development of an interactive multimedia product (or title), a diversity spanning the creative arts, computer science and engineering communities.
Extensive interviews within the Australian IMM producer community indicate that a development project team needs a set of core skills. The nurturing of such teams is a true discriminator for success (Figure 6).
Figure 6: The core skills for interactive multimedia content development: descriptions of nine key people in a leading firm
Person 1: Executive producer/publisher/financier/negotiator of
contracts/ marketeer/business development
Person 2: Computer technical expert/ creative systems
designer/systems integrator/broad based hardware and
software knowledge/commercial know-how
Person 3: Technical team leader/audio and video know how/authoring
tools/focus on software usability/QA
Person 4: Language specialist(s)/literary and story editor/ also key
quality assurance role
Person 5: Telecommunications/broadcasting expertise (key for
designing for on-line as well as CD-ROM)
Person 6: Project manager/on-time and on-cost competence/probably
with film and TV experience
Person 7: Librarian/information retrieval specialist
Person 8: R&D/computer science orientation (hardware, operating
system, object oriented design)
Person 9: Creative director/art director/graphic designer (product
"look and feel")
Others: (usually contracted on a project basis):
* instructional designer
* human interface/industrial design
* script writers/authors
* musicians
* animators
* film crew
* programmers
The talent for interactive multimedia content creation can come from experiences based in any of the "traditional" content industries (as well as from unrelated fields). Thus it is relevant to examine the scale and parameters of the total content development industries in Australia, and to dimension the human capital already deployed in these industries that could be redirected into interactive multimedia content development, at least in part, during the next decade.