Client Case Study: Flambeau Fishing CDROM

Is Multimedia in Your Tackle Box?

When Flambeau came to WRL wanting a catalog on CD, WRL gave it the personal touch.

In 2004, Flambeau, the manufacturers of popular fishing tackle boxes, approached WRL with an idea. They wanted an interactive CD-Rom catalog that they could put inside their tackle boxes.

With Flambeau's permission, we set out to "fun it up." We saw the chance to build a bridge between the youth-friendly sport of fishing and the fact that today's children are tech savvy computer users. Our goal was to create something that would take the company's name outside the typical fishing universe.

And so The Big Catch was born. It's a professional looking, kid-friendly guide to fishing that even adults would find useful. Besides a look at some of the shining stars of the Flambeau product line, The Big Catch also has illustrated tutorials on how to properly hook a worm, cast your line, land a fish – and even release it if it's not bound for the dinner table. There are also guides filled with information about 13 of the most popular American game fish, and step-by-step instructions for tying fishing knots.

Currently being manufactured, The Big Catch will soon appear as a value-added bonus in youth tackle boxes throughout the Midwestern United States. Most important of all, Flambeau's name will be out there, spinning in the computers of fishing fanatics everywhere.

Micro-Sized CDROMs

This isn't some kind of new music CD that your kids are buying or a ninja throwing weapon – it's your competitive advantage.

Micro CDROMs in custom shapes not only grab attention – they retain it. Micros can be pressed into just about any shape you can imagine. They work in any CDROM drive and can contain anything you like – company information, presentations, sales and contact information, or whatever else you can think of.

Our clients use these eye-catchers for trade show handouts, inserts, direct mailing, and leave behinds. What can you use them for? It's limited only by your imagination!

Call a multimedia expert at WRL today and find out how to put Micro power to work for you.

The Interactive Difference

As the name suggests, interactive multimedia responds to user interactivity, typically by offering menus that guide the user along various information pathways. In this respect it's a revolutionary communication tool, allowing users to easily find the exact information they want while minimizing time and effort sifting through unwanted information. Interactive multimedia also has familiar roots; much like television and film, multimedia combines graphics, sound, video and animation into a single product aimed at telling a story or delivering a message: boy meets girl, meet our company, visit our museum. Interactivity puts a whole new spin on the already-familiar concept of combining media.

When an audience watches a video, information flows in one direction and viewers take a passive role. But when a user sitting at a computer — whether accessing a CD-ROM in the computer or connected via phone lines to the Internet — chooses the information he or she wants, bypassing irrelevant or already familiar material and moving directly to new topics, multimedia evolves into a learning tool that cuts out wasted time while bumping up the number of fronts on which information is presented.

The more senses people engage when absorbing information, the more they comprehend and remember. A class studying the concept of apples might look at pictures of apples, touch apples, smell apples, taste apples and sing songs about apples — in short, engage as many senses as possible in learning about apples. This tactic achieves two ends: it accommodates different learning styles (some people are primarily visual learners while others respond better to aural or tactile stimuli), and it reinforces personal learning by transmitting the same information into different parts of the brain.

Multimedia by its very nature engages multiple senses, whether the audience group is potential clients getting familiar with your company's products or employees learning new procedures. Skillfully combined imagery, sound and text capture attention more decisively than any of those elements alone, reaching audiences on multiple cognitive levels and resulting in higher retention.

In a paper titled "Why Interactive Multimedia Language Learning," author Brian A. Victoria of the University of Auckland 's Multimedia Laboratory at Tamaki reports that "studies have shown that people remember 20% of what they hear, 40% of what they see and hear, but 70% of what they see, hear, and do." In other words, combining media to communicate information is good, but incorporating interactivity is even better.

The degree of interactivity can be adjusted to the program's applications. A touch-screen kiosk in a pharmacy introducing a line of home health care products can allow the average user the ability to navigate through categories of products to find the information he or she wants.

Source: etimes.com - Author: Traci Hukill

Multimedia TechTips

Desktop Video: Players and Problems

The current availability of hundreds of media players available for free and for purchase prompts the question, "Which one should I use?"

In the world of the PC, Windows Media Player 10 is the most reliable and versatile player for Windows, but lacks some abilities that other players have.

For professional animators, video editors, and enthusiasts, I recommend FrameCycler by Iridas. FrameCycler will playback uncompressed film and broadcast quality movies with no loss in speed or quality. It plays most of the popular video formats, and is cube-based color calibrated.

For the everyday user, several different players do a great job and support a multitude of formats. These include UltraPlayer, VLC Player, mPlayer and the popular PowerCinema.

On the Macintosh side of things, Quicktime is the standard to be beaten. As powerful as it is, it does not handle a variety of formats from the Windows world unless a separate codec is downloaded. However, the OS X versions of both mPlayer and VLC Player give Quicktime a run for the money by being able to play most popular video formats "out of the box" without any further downloading or configuration. Both are great either as an enhancement to or a replacement for Quicktime.

Having trouble playing a video?

If you find you're having trouble with a movie file, the most likely problem is not the file. It is probably a codec issue. You can check the codec of most video files by ALT-clicking on the file, then selecting the summary tab. Under Video Compression you should see which codec was used when the video was compressed. A simple Google search for that name plus the word codec should get you a link to the appropriate codec installer.

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