Planning the Captivate Movie

The first rule of planning any interactive media project is this: "Focus on the user. Don't focus on the technology."

You are not the audience for the presentation. When planning a Captivate movie, the first step in the process is not to open the application but to ask yourself the following questions:

• Who is the audience?

  A movie designed for primary-school children will look and feel a lot different from one designed for software engineers.

• What does the audience need to learn from the movie?

  These are the learning objectives, and the fewertwo or threethe better. What is the audience's skill level regarding the content of the presentation?

  A presentation designed for people who have never used software will be a lot more basic than one designed for power users. Knowing the audience's skills will also give you a good idea of the project's scope and complexity.

After you have determined the project's scope and understand the audience, you can then move into planning the movie's content. This is where the importance of a storyboard or script can't be understated.

Using storyboards and scripts

Storyboards use rough sketches to plan the progression of the movie. These can range in detail from a series of pencil sketches on a sheet of blank paper to full-color drawings created in drawing or imaging applications like Macromedia Freehand MX and Fireworks MX 2004. If you will be using lots of screen shots in your movie with few captions or minimal text, a storyboard would work well.

Traditionally, scripts are created using word processing software. Scripts enable you to describe, in depth, the contents of each screen and to present the movie in a logical, sequenced order. If your movie will contain numerous captions, text, voiceover audio, and so on, you should create a script.

Storyboards and Macromedia Studio MX 2004

If you own Macromedia Studio MX 2004, you have three very powerful storyboard creation tools at your disposalFreehand MX, Flash MX Professional 2004, and Fireworks MX 2004.

Freehand MX is a vector-drawing tool. One of the application's features is the ability to create multipage documents. Also, you can use master pageswhich can hold commonly used elements such as logos and headingsand apply them to any or all of the pages in your document. For example, the new Connector tool enables you to create flowcharts showing the branching in quizzes, and the new Action tool lets you to add basic Flash actions to a storyboard destined for the Web. You can also print out the story boards and use them as client deliverables.

Flash MX Professional 2004, though aimed squarely at the Web coder, also contains a powerful storyboarding toolthe Slide Presentation. This feature allows even non-Flash users to quickly prepare an interactive presentation that can then be presented to the client for approval.

Fireworks MX 2004 is Macromedia's Web imaging application. Apart from creating GIF animations that can simulate each frame of a recording, you can use this application to optimize images used in Captivate. Further, the use of a symbols library in Fireworks enables you to reuse such items as logos text without the inevitable file size increase. Unlike RoboDemo, Captivate does include a Story board View panel. The purpose of this area is not to let you plan your movie, but to rearrange the slides in the movie prior to its being published.