Aspire relational presentation workshops and tutorials teach interactive presentation skills for PowerPoint 2007 and PowerPoint 2003

Workshop Levels

Level 4—Advanced Relational Presentation and Media Creation Skills

The Relational Presentation techniques covered in Levels 2 and 3 certainly add considerable flexibility and depth to speaking activities. That's an excellent start, and some people pause their training activities at that point so that they can focus on building their network structure and practice using it.

We encourage such a break because it allows assimilation of lessons learned. At the same time, be careful not to wait too long. Level 4 sessions fill in vital missing pieces of visually interactive strategy that can make or break your success over the coming months.

Adding flexibility to content is good but then questions arise: How good is your content? Do you have the skills necessary for building customized imagery? Can you create and integrate audio and video? Do you know how to maximize PowerPoint's animation features to aid relational delivery and better teach ideas?

Level 4 contains six sessions that address these areas so that you can improve your media creation skills. Let's face it. Most of us are scared to death of the word media. Video and audio are what those geeky people create and, certainly, learning how to be a graphic artist must take a great deal of talent and is very difficult, right?

Well, not necessarily. You CAN learn the basics of these subjects without losing your sanity. In fact, you'll probably have a lot of fun in Level 4 sessions. The focus is on graphics, audio, video, and meaningful use of PowerPoint animations. Extensive hands-on exercises guide your progress through each subject. Note: You must have completed Levels 2 and 3 before attending Level 4 sessions.

Sessions 4.1 and 4.2

Graphics Creation and Editing: These two sessions cover digital graphics skills and teach you how to 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, serving as both 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 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

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 interactions.

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

Session 4.5 and 4.6

Animation: Finally, 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 yourself, "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 audience members and hurt your cause. These sessions first teach basic and medium-level animation techniques, and then turn 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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