As a number of you have noticed, the default speed when you save your powerpoint as a movie is very fast–the slides go by in about 2 seconds, which is too fast for reading most of your brilliant works.

So, to leave slides up for longer:

1. click transitions>
2. transition options>
3. when you see the pop-up dialogue box, click ‘advance slide after (add whatever you like here—however long you want your slide up) seconds’.

Note:  By clicking ‘all transitions’ at the upper left, you’ll be making sure that all slides play for that length of time when you save as a movie (you can also do this by highlighting all the slides in the left column).  If you want some slides to stay up for longer than others, you should highlight each slide individually and change the seconds for each one.

A couple of other things to note:  unfortunately, the movie format will NOT support the in -slide powerpoint animations so many of you are fond of.  I’m working on a solution to that, but in the meantime, you should be creating more than one slide when you want new text and/or elements to appear, then dissolving between the slides.  See my demo video for a reminder on how to do that.

It’s also more difficult than one might have thought to embed video into the slides, then to have that transfer to the movie format.  Even when successfully playing, things are still turning out wacky for most of us (for example, the rest of the slides get thrown off).  We’ll keep working on that.  But there is good news: as we move forward, we’re going to be transferring this project to imovie, where we’ll be able to manage things more handily.

There are two goals here.  First, we want to turn your powerpoint based projects into videos, and second we want to be able to upload a video to this class site so that it’s directly viewable (embedded), rather than just a link.

To do that, follow these steps:

1.  Create your powerpoint project.  More on that here.
2.  when it’s finished, click file>save as movie.  When the dialogue box appears, save the movie to, say, your desktop.
3.  upload movie to youtube or vimeo.   Whichever you chose is up to you, but the instructions that follow refer to youtube..  You’ll need to create an account, but once you do, uploading is as easy as clicking ‘upload video’ and finding the movie you saved to your desktop. NOTE: Remember that copywrited material will cause problems, particularly music that you don’t own the rights to.  We’ll discuss how to deal with this in an upcoming post.
4. Now you need to embed your movie into a class page.  First, copy the embed code from your youtube video.  You can find it here:
5. Go to our class site and create a new post.
6. copy that shortcode drectly into ‘visual’ tab (that is, you do not have to switch to the html tab to embed your video)
7. click your name category AND ‘short project Oct 24^th’
8. publish the post
9. YOU’RE DONE!

First, watch this slideshow, which will give you an overview of the project. There’s more information and specific instructions for this project below the slideshow, so be sure to work your way all the way through this tutorial. NOTE: I made this slideshow in Keynote (which is a Mac Powerpoint-like program), so some of the terminology is a bit different than Powerpoint. And also, of course, what we’re doing for Monday isn’t your final project.

Sample Annotation and Final Projects

Because the nice transitions between slides are stripped out of the above powerpoint (this has to do with where I have it hosted), you can watch a video version of it below (it takes a while to load, but go ahead and skip around to get a sense of what I mean by ‘transition’ and ‘dissolve’ between slides). Every line in your text can appear and disappear this way if you like, with an image to match.

[display_podcast]

Now for the particulars! Follow these steps:

1) Create a powerpoint slide.  More on that here.

2) Choose a theme/change colors/customize the slide background.  More on that here.

3) Create text

4) Add shapes and/or text boxes to highlight phrases

5) add text within those shapes and text boxes (you might want to do this the other way around, to create the box around your text).

6) add images as you like to the annotation.  Use arrows or other indicators to connect particular images to particular words and phrases.

7) repeat as necessary, from step 3.  remember you don’t have to have all your text, or your annotations, on one slide, but can ‘move’ from slide to slide by adding dissolves between slides. (Note that this isn’t the only way to do this, so if you prefer another, go for it).

REMEMBER:  Be creative!  Have fun!

When you’re finished, save the powerpoint presentation.  Come to class Monday with it and your computer, and I’ll show you how to convert and then post it to our class site.