Level 4—Media Creation Skills

Relational Presentation techniques covered in Levels 2 and 3 add considerable flexibility and depth to speaking activities. That's good. Then the next question to ask is, "What am I actually showing my audiences? Does my presentation network contain high-quality, rich media that increases the effectiveness and value of my messages?"

In other words, if bullet points are all we have to offer, flexible delivery, in itself, will have limited impact. Audiences will still be bored because such slides provide little visual stimuli that captures interest. Remember that when audience members go home to their DVD players, log on to Web sites, or go to movies, there will be plenty of visual interest available—and like it or not, your presentation materials are competing with these other forms of media. To make content more compelling, consider learning how to build quality, interactive visual components that help express ideas.

Level 4 explores the skills necessary for building such content. The four areas of interest are: graphics, audio, video, and meaningful use of PowerPoint animations. Extensive hands-on exercises teach powerful content creation techniques that are essential to visually interactive presentation. Note: Levels 2 and 3 are prerequisite to Level 4.

Sessions 4-1 and 4-2

Graphics Creation and Editing: These two sessions cover digital graphics skills and help you sequentially develop a graphic image from scratch, using either Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements. Digital graphics are images that are formed or modified using a computer. Graphics play an essential role in Relational Presentation, where they may serve as either content or decoration. Learning how to construct useful digital images is a skill every relational designer should know. Graphics and pictures are the vocabulary of the visual language you are learning to speak.

Level 4 specifically highlights graphic creation methods that are most relevant to presentation designers who build interactivity-based slides. You will learn to:

• Downsize pictures
• Crop pictures
• Combine pictures with other pictures via layers
• Add transparency
• Save with transparency
• Add bevel, embossing, and glow to text and pictures
• Modify pixel data with layer masks
• Alter colors using adjustment layers
• Change color and brightness
• Add color gradients
• Touch up and alter image characteristics
• Build graphical buttons for navigation

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Session 4-3

Audio Creation and Editing: Use of meaningful audio in PowerPoint presentations is relatively rare. Even so, audio can accentuate a presenter’s performance in many ways, especially during interaction.

Session 4-3 introduces the use of Audacity, software designed for making and editing sound components. Audacity is free and surprisingly robust in what it can do. Here you will learn to record digital audio, such as a narration for an automated slide show, and then digitally modify or enhance it. Exercises cover:

• Increasing volume
• Combining separate audio tracks
• Splitting audio tracks into separate segments (very important for random selection)
• Removing unwanted noise
• And numerous other techniques

This session also addresses how to incorporate audio into a PowerPoint network and outlines the process for creating what we call an audio switchboard. Having a switchboard for audio allows a presenter to dynamically choose between many, perhaps hundreds, of sound clips. For example, a training program for car mechanics might contain recordings of sounds made by different engine models, under various diagnostic circumstances.

Session 4-4

Video Creation and Editing: For most presenters, the thought of working with digital video is out of the question. Surely such computerized wizardry is reserved for highly technical people. In reality, though, basic video editing (and audio editing for that matter) are quite easy. Anyone can learn remarkably useful skills in a short period of time.

Video editing is fast becoming a fundamental expertise many of us are (or soon will be) using in everyday communication activities. Video clips are proliferating at a striking rate because of digital video cameras and even cell phones. Your presentation network should include at least some video.

Session 4-4 introduces the use of Camtasia software, a relatively inexpensive and highly practical application that is very useful to relational presenters. We will use it to:

• Trim and splice clips
• Save edited clips into various movie formats
• Add or change audio tracks associated with video clips
• Add transitions between spliced clips
• Select scenes in clips that will be the basis for thumbnail images (useful as navigation buttons)

Likewise, Camtasia allows us to record live PowerPoint performances (complete with audio) and save the result as a movie, or in streaming format for Web display. All of the PowerPoint demonstrations on this site were created using a combination of PowerPoint and Camtasia. And, as with audio, you will learn how to build a very special form of nested switchboard for video display. This format helps a presenter quickly and randomly select clips at any time, as needed while presenting.

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Session 4-5 and 4-6

Animation: Finally, these two sessions describe how to take advantage of PowerPoint’s animation features for:

• Building motion-based navigation
• Selecting and highlighting content
• Bringing hidden content (supportive details) into view as needed
• Playing media such as audio and video
• Demonstrating sequential processes

The emphasis here is on applying animation in meaningful ways. You will be asking, "Does this movement or animated action help people learn, assist me in some way as a presenter, or help clarify my message? These issues are extremely important. Using PowerPoint animations just because you can—in other words without useful purpose—may distract audiences and hurt your cause. Level 4 teaches basic and medium-level animation techniques and then turns to more sophisticated grouped animations.

Animated navigation elements, for example, require a collection of supporting motions to produce desired effects. Such elements typically are invisible until the presenter chooses to fade them into view.

Animation, when used well, adds a professional edge to interaction that is not possible with any other style of presentation. These methods, along with other media inclusion, offer stunning alternatives to typical bullet point-filled slide shows.

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