Adding Animation to Powerpoint Slides

This is Part 3 of a series about how to create marketing videos for your business using Powerpoint slides. Here are the first two installments:

Part 1, How To Design Powerpoint Slides for Videos
Part 2, How To Choose a Topic for Your Marketing Videos.

People have very short attention spans, even for short videos that run less than 2 minutes. Successful videos will capture the viewer’s attention but the trick is to keep them interested for the full duration.

In addition to offering interesting and valuable information in your video, another way to keep the viewers’ interest is to keep your slides moving and to add animation to your slides.

No, this isn’t cartoon animation, which would be very cost prohibitive for any small business. This animation makes the text and images on your slides move.

Take another look at this video for the SCORE Clinic. Take a special note of how the slides change (it looks like a page turning) and how each bullet point fades in to view.

When I’m creating a video, I find it easiest to get all my slide designs completed before adding the animations.

1. Open up your powerpoint slides and click on the Animations tab.

2. Under the Animations tab, you’ll see a bunch of icons with various arrows and designs. These are the different ways each slide will transition throughout the video.

For instance, you can have each slide turn like a page in a book, either turning from left to right, or from right to left. Or maybe you want a window blind effect. Simply hover your cursor over each icon to see a preview of each transition. Also, click on the arrow to the right to see more transition choices.

3. You can also add sounds as each slide transitions (changes from one slide to the next).

Keep in mind, if you’re using background music throughout the video, there’s no need for these transition sounds. But if you’re doing a voice over, transition sounds might bring a little humor to the video, or at least bring the viewer’s attention back to the screen.

Simply click on the arrow next to Transition Sound to open up the dropdown window. Choose your sound and voila!

4. Transition Speed gives you three choices of how fast you want your slides to change. Again, this will depend on what your video is about and what mood you’re trying to set. Experimenting with the various types of transitions and speeds is really the only way to familiarize yourself with the possibilities.

Once you’ve settled on the effect, click the Apply to All link. Or you can set each slide to have a different transition effect. You are in complete creative control!

5. The animation effects you just added to the slide transitions are very similar to the effects you can add to the text on each slide. This is especially effective if you have bullet points that you want to highlight or if you just have too much information on a slide and don’t want to overwhelm your viewer.

First, highlight the text that you want animated. Then on the right under the Custom Animation tab, click the Add Effect button.

You will then see the dropdown box to choose Entrance, Emphasis, Exit or Motion Paths. Each of these choices opens up another box. As you can see, your choices are many and you really need to just experiment to get the look you want.

6. Once you have your chosen effect, click on the Start arrow. The On Click choice means the animation will not start until you click your mouse; With Previous means the text transition will occur automatically as soon as the slide changes (or with another sentence appearing); After Previous means the effect will occur automatically as soon as the previous transition is finished.

You also have the option of choosing the animation speed, same as with the slide transitions.

Continue to highlight any text on any slide that should be animated. You can choose every bullet point on every slide or you can make the effect different for every line of text. Once an animation effect has been chosen, you’ll see various numbers appear on your slides. This is simply the Powerpoint code indicating that animation has been chosen; these numbers do not show up in your final slideshow.

One nice thing about these animations is that you can preview the effects and timing immediately. Check the box for Auto Preview in the bottom right corner of the Custom Animation tab on the right. As soon as you make your transition choices, Powerpoint shows you what it will look like so you can make any changes immediately.

One more note: you can set your photos or images to be animated as well! Simply click on the image (instead of text) and go through the same process as illustrated above.

Even though your imagination can go crazy with these animations and slide transitions, keep your viewer in mind. Your goal is to keep them interested in what you have to say, not giving them a headache from watching a crazy number of transitions.

In the next installment we’ll discuss how to find suitable music for your video.

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