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The audience does not see the difference between 4 consecutive slides with different images, or 1 slides with 4 consecutive image build up, so there is no point in trying to cut slides by consolidating 4 images into one. Four slides are easier to edit, and four separate slides are easier to email as PDF.
This video shows how the political map of Europe has changed in 1,000 years. There is a lot of information packed in here, but the only one that gets across is: “lots of things have changed”. To bring more information to the surface, you need to slow down the pace, and add labels/stickers to highlight the key changes and go into the detail. Both visualisations work, the third option - stuck in the middle - will not.
Bombastic animated introductions are often used to promote movies, and some people might think they make spectacular product presentations. However, I think that a 3D animated product name with loud music does not make a good connection with the audience.
When you need a complex animation, it is often easier to uncover objects by removing a white box than build up a shape step by step, especially if the shape includes a data graph (columns, lines, bars).
PowToon aims to enable you to create cartoon-style, animated presentation and video clips without professional illustration and motion graphics software. I test drove the beta version.
When you look at many cartoon-style videos you see that they are actually not that complicated from a graphics point of view. Usually they involve a number of scenes (slides), they use static characters, basic entrance, exit, and emphasize animations and sometimes a cute hand that puts items on the slide, all accompanied by some simple music.
And this is what PowToon does. The edit interface looks Windows blue, it allows you to place items in a slide and specify the animations. In theory, PowerPoint or Keynote can do the same things, but it requires a deep understanding of the software, plus a library of characters.
There is definitely a market for a tool like PowToon. I do not envision these type of animations to be used in a stand-up presentation, but rather they could be useful to create demo videos on web pages, or presentations for emailing to prospects.
The basics of PowToon work great. I spent 10 minutes to stitch together this video based on a pre-defined template. PowToon is still in beta, and there are a number of features that I would recommend the team to incorporate:
I am not a big fan of animation, spectacular effects do not support a serious business message and documents with animations do not convert well to PDF for emailing.
Sometimes there is no escaping though, especially when you need to explain components of a complex system. The best way to do this is to add elements one-by-one through a series of clicks.
The usual way to do this is to use pop-up animations. However, these can be cumbersome to edit: you often forget one item in a group, and have to start all over again.
There is an alternative: cover the critical elements in your slide with boxes and remove the boxes one by one. Easier to edit. You can even make it more sophisticated by given the boxes a 10% transparency: the viewer sees sort of what is coming, but not completely. When you want to PDF and email a version of your document, you simply delete all the boxes which leaves the full diagram intact.
Have a look at the way**Francesco Paciocco** credited this short video about Milan. It is a video, but the shots are very close to still images. We do not see the cliché images of the Duomo and other tourist attractions. Instead, a flow of scenes from daily live.
I like cinematic openings in PowerPoint presentations. A series of images to take the audience to a different place. While it might be a bit too complicated for the average designer to create such a video, you can create a very similar effect in PowerPoint by sequencing a series of Flickr images with a Creative Commons license. If you want, you can go one step further and add a slow-zoom effect to your images.
Here is an impressive piece of video animation work by Patrick Clair. Watch the use of narrow all caps fonts.
One of my presentations in the public domain. This time the setup was the global finals of the 2010 Global Security Challenge in London. Startups that had won the regional semifinals were granted 6 minutes to pitch their company in the field of IT security to a jury. I designed the presentation for IDU Biometrics within the following constraints:
Here is the video version of the presentation:
Here is a Prezi-presentation (see earlier posts) with some facts about the growth of data sent over mobile networks. Praise for Byte Mobile to experiment with different presentation formats. Here: Prezi is used in the following way:
Bytemobile Mobile Minute Metrics - Feb 2010 on Prezi
For me, this is not yet the best way to use the power of Prezi. But if you ask me what is the right way, I must admit I do not have an answer yet.