Animation, Video and Special Effects

• 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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