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Animation, Video and Special Effects

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About this lesson

Best practices for using animations and special effects in a presentation.

  • 00:04 The beauty of Powerpoint is you create it on a computer and
  • 00:08 what's the good news there?
  • 00:09 You've got the full power, all the resources on your computer.
  • 00:14 That means you can use animation,
  • 00:16 special effects, builds, all sorts of graphics, cartoons.
  • 00:20 You can do all this stuff, that sounds great, right?
  • 00:24 Time out.
  • 00:27 I've seen it happen so
  • 00:29 many times where people get immersed in the special effects.
  • 00:34 They lose sight of what they're really trying to do.
  • 00:36 When you're giving a presentation, the only people that understand important
  • 00:40 ideas to you remember them so they can act on them.
  • 00:47 Unless you are out in Hollywood and you're trying to get a job at Dreamworks.
  • 00:51 Your goal is not to impress people with your animation skills.
  • 00:57 Time is finite.
  • 00:58 Busy executives have limited amounts of time.
  • 01:02 You've got to make cold hard decisions on how to use your time.
  • 01:09 Once you start down this path of, oh, I want this cool little graphic here.
  • 01:14 Next thing you know, you're fidding around with it for two hours.
  • 01:18 And that's time you don't have to actually rehearse your speech,
  • 01:22 refine your stories, make sure your speech is interesting.
  • 01:26 So I I advise my clients not that they can never use special effects or animation or
  • 01:31 video, but to make sure they have everything else straight first.
  • 01:36 Make sure you have a great presentation.
  • 01:38 Make sure you can give a great presentation.
  • 01:39 If the projector breaks, the bulb burns out, and you just have to stand and
  • 01:44 talk in front of people.
  • 01:46 Make sure you have rehearsed that speech on the video, and
  • 01:49 you're great even if your deck doesn't work.
  • 01:53 Then and only then, worry about the animation, the special effects.
  • 02:01 I remember within a decade ago, I was conducting presentation training
  • 02:06 in Saint Croix with a bunch of engineers.
  • 02:10 One of them was giving a PowerPoint presentation, and
  • 02:13 in the presentation he had a bird flutter across the screen, all the way like this.
  • 02:20 And after his presentation, everyone's like wow, Jim, how'd you do that?
  • 02:23 That was fantastic.
  • 02:25 That was great.
  • 02:25 Oh, thank you very much, he said.
  • 02:28 Everyone was impressed.
  • 02:29 They said this is fantastic.
  • 02:31 This is wonderful.
  • 02:34 But then I turned to everyone else in the room.
  • 02:36 I said okay, who can tell me what the point of that animation was,
  • 02:41 or the point of that slide?
  • 02:43 What was the point of it?
  • 02:44 What is the message behind it?
  • 02:48 Nobody had any clue.
  • 02:50 They remember the animation, but it was completely disconnected from any message.
  • 02:55 In my view, that means it was completely worthless.
  • 03:00 Here's the problem with animation and editing together slick videos,
  • 03:05 once you get into that realm, people are going to be comparing you conscious or
  • 03:10 not of what they've seen from Hollywood.
  • 03:13 Steven Spielberg, Jerry Bruckheimer, big budget Hollywood extravaganzas.
  • 03:19 Guess what?
  • 03:21 You're not going to win a comparison.
  • 03:24 You and Steven Spielberg, or Lucas, or
  • 03:28 any of the other great Hollywood director producers.
  • 03:32 So why play that game?
  • 03:36 So, make sure your presentation is great.
  • 03:39 If the comparison is between you speaking and the boring speaker before you and
  • 03:43 after you, well that's a competition I relish.
  • 03:46 It's easy to stand out as a great, interesting speaker.
  • 03:50 It's relatively hard to stand out for a great production values.
  • 03:56 And I've never yet seen anyone have fantastic production values,
  • 04:02 and they spent enough time practicing, and rehearsing their actual speech.
  • 04:08 So, focus on the area where you can have the biggest impact
  • 04:12 that takes comparatively less time.
  • 04:14 Make sure you can deliver your speech in an interesting engaging way
  • 04:18 work on your stories.
  • 04:20 Practice on video till you're great.
  • 04:23 And for the most part the PowerPoint put up one image at a time.
  • 04:27 You don't need builds, you don't need special effects.
  • 04:33 The problem with video and audio is 90% of the time when people are using it,
  • 04:38 it doesn't work because they didn't get to the venue on time.
  • 04:42 To do a full rehearsal, that you make sure all the speakers were on and
  • 04:47 the video player was compatible with their format, and so
  • 04:51 they spend their time apologizing for the video not playing in their power concert.
  • 04:58 That's not how you want to spend your time in front of people.
  • 05:01 So, if you're going to use any sort of av audio visual elements in your PowerPoint,
  • 05:07 make sure you get to the venue, practice on the actual equipment same day,
  • 05:13 ten minutes before because it's really easy for it to go wrong.
  • 05:18 My recommendation keep it simple.
  • 05:21 Images, one image at a time, no music, no animation,
  • 05:24 no special effects, no builds, just throw up your image.
  • 05:29 Make the idea, go to the next slide, and you'll be way, way ahead of the game.

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Use Two Separate PowerPoints
06m:08s
B is for Black
06m:08s
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