WEEK ONE

Presentation slides are a canvas you can use to paint your story. Beautiful presentation slides will help you appear professional and keep your audience engaged. While the very process of creating great presentation slides helps prepare you for your presenta- tion and boost your confidence.

SSEEttUUPP SSiiddeekkiicckk Hello! Welcome to week one! In this week we look at a couple of options that are available for you to create presentation slides for your videos.

We’ll have a look at: • • • Microsoft Powerpoint • Canva Presentation

We’ll also talk photography and images this week. You’ll find out where to find free stock images to use in your slides and how to use and edit them in Canva.

Your step-by-step, hands-on exercise for this week is to create your own slide deck using Canva.

I hope you have fun creating your slides and please take note of your questions and I’ll answer them for you in the Q&A session on Thursday.

Lisa (a.k.a. Your Setup Sidekick) Let’s look at your presentation slide options

So why are we talking about presentation slides in this program? Video is one of the most effective training tools available with a ‘talking-head’ video being one of the most commonly used formats. But they’re not as effective as they could be. Video of one person talking, captured with one camera from a single perspec- tive, without supporting footage isn’t dynamic enough to engage a web audience. That’s where slides come in - to break the visual monotony. A great visual with a teeny tiny bit of text is all that’s needed to make your point. Visuals are magic because they help your audience to pay attention, understand, remember, and use the information you share with them.

These days there are a lot of different tools available for you to design beautiful presentation slides, but having too many options leads to decision fatigue (yes it’s a thing). To save you from getting lost in Google search after Google search here are 4 options to help you make a choice.

Prezi First up - we have Prezi. Prezi claims to be “Designed for people who aren’t designers” and it has a number of really cool features that are definitely unique to Prezi. With its sleek, intuitive layout and simple drag and drop functionality, you’ll be building presentations on your own in no time. There are also a number of pre-designed templates for you to use and modify to suit your requirements. It’s an online tool but you can also use their desktop app or download your presentations if you’d prefer to present offline.

Prezi also has pre-designed presentation ‘building blocks’ called story blocks. These are things like, maps, charts, tables, lists, timelines or even mockups (for example, there is an editable mockup of a social media post that you can type into). So an example of how you could use a laptop screen mockup story block is to add the laptop screen image and link a video to it so when you click on the laptop screen mockup the video plays. Another great feature they have is their voice over feature. This allows you to upload audio files linked to specific pieces of content - so when you click on it the audio file plays.

Unique features Rather than using individual slides, Prezi has a large canvas on which you can zoom in and out of specific parts to emphasize text, visual content and ideas. I really love the ‘zoom reveal’ feature. This is a fluid, smooth zoom in to highlight details within your presentation and you can also zoom out to show your audience how your ideas fit into a bigger picture. It’s a little hard to explain so the canvas and zoom is best viewed in action. You navigate by clicking on the canvas or using the back and forward arrows. I really love Prezi - can you tell?

Prezi’s pricing starts at $5/month for the Standard personal use option and goes up to $29/month for their premium version.

You can give Prezi a try with their 14-day trial (no credit card required). Google Slides Next up - we have Google Slides which is completely free with a Google account. When you are logged into Google, Slides is available at any time as one of the tools included in its Google Docs productivity suite. It is fully integrated into Google Drive so you’re able to automatically save it there. Google Slide’s best feature is probably the live cloud collaboration, which allows multiple people to work on presenta- tions in real-time.

The design process is simple and to the point and there are also hundreds of themes, thousands of fonts, embedded videos and animations all available for free. It has the standard features, such as basic animations, transitions between slides and drawing tools.

One disadvantage is that you’re unable to embed any videos other than YouTube (so no Vimeo video’s etc). You’re also limited when it comes to animations, tran- sitions, music and typefaces. There’s also far less scope for customisation when it comes to creating different shaped text boxes, aligning objects and merging shapes.

All-in-all its a pretty decent presentation tool and it’s great that you don’t have to pay a cent to use it.

Give Google Slides a try if you like.

Powerpoint Powerpoint has been around for a long time and it is so pervasive that the word ‘Powerpoint’ is often used as a term to mean ‘slideshow’ irrespective of the soft- ware used to create it. Everyone has seen Powerpoint in action at some point in their lives and knows what Powerpoint is, what it looks like, and what it does. If you already have then Powerpoint is yours for free. If not, it’s available as part of an Office 365 subscription or as a one-off Office purchase (which lacks regular updates and some cloud features). An Office 365 Personal subscription starts at $69.99/year or $6.99/month for a single user. If you just want to buy Powerpoint as a one-off, it’s $139.99.

As for what you can do with Powerpoint, is still the best in terms of the number of features you get with the program. You can combine animations, text, photos and video into slides and there is also a fantastic array of slide transitions. Powerpoint is also very easy to use, whether you want to duplicate one slide to form the basis of another, or you want to display the slideshow on one screen and manage your notes on the other, or you need to export the whole slideshow as a video – everything is easy to do. There are a few new features like the Designer, that Microsoft has recently added to Powerpoint for Office 365 subscribers. The Designer uses elements you’ve added to the page to suggest new and innovative layouts you might not have thought of yourself.

You can give Powerpoint a try for free for a month. Canva Next up - Canva. If you really struggle with tech then Canva is the perfect tool for you. It’s also the tool I’ve selected for you to try out in the exercise as it’s a great tool to get you up and running with presentation slides quickly and easily.

So what is Canva? Well, Canva, is a very simple design platform that allows you to create amazing and professional quality graphic designs for everything from flyers, banners, posters, social media posts to presentations - mostly for free. I say mostly because the only time you need to pay for anything created in Canva is if you use one of the paid resources ie. If you select a paid image from their library then you need to pay for it (these are usually $1). They have an extensive library of free images and you can also upload your own images so there is rarely any need to pay for images.

The general flow of Canva is simple, you sign up and then just follow the screen prompts. Canva will ask you to choose what type of graphic you’re trying to create, then it’ll suggest various template visuals for you to choose from. Once you’ve selected the layout and template you’d like, you can customise it to suit your requirements. Everything is drag and drop, and text can be edited much like text boxes in any other graphic design software. It’s very easy to use.

Right, let’s talk Canva presentations. While the free version of Canva allows you to create slides, there are no animations or transition etc. as we have with the previous options. Animation is available with Canva Pro at $9.95/user/month, billed yearly. However for the purpose of creating slides for a video, what you get with the free version of Canva is exactly what you need. Let’s talk presentation slide basics

Aspect Ratio I just wanted to add this one in here as I recently had a client, let’s call her Anna, create an entire presentation using the wrong aspect ratio - and changing aspect ratio is not a simple one-click process. So what is aspect ratio? In video, it’s the ratio of the width to the height of an image or screen.

On desktop, mobile, and smart TV, there are three standard formats: • 4:3 — “Academy format,” the standard for most films made before the 1950s • 16:9 — aka this “widescreen” format is standard for HDTV (and now, most desk- top video players, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter) • 21:9 — “anamorphic” format is most often used in movies by filmmakers shoot- ing on digital

Only 4:3 and 16:9 are important to you for future reference. So your most im- portant consideration will be where your slide/video is likely to be viewed. In most instances 16:9 works best (ie a mobile phone flipped sideways shows 16:9 wides- creen perfectly).

So what did my client, Anna do wrong? She created her presentation slides using the 4:3 aspect ratio, which meant that on most laptops, PC’s and tablets she had black bars down the side of her slides. Not ideal for her presentation but currently becoming popular amongst moviemakers once more as it portrays a specific old- school intimate ‘mood’.

4:3 aspect ratio displayed on a widescreen device

Image via Guava Island (Amazon Studios). The rule of 3 Stop, drop, and roll; lights, camera, action; ready, set, go – these sets are just some examples of the rule of 3 in use. It’s a psychological trick - people tend to remember everything better in threes. Steve Jobs applied the rule of 3 in nearly every presen- tation and product launch he did. If it worked for him it’ll definitely work for you. So how do you use the rule of 3 with your presentation slides? Divide your slides into three parts - for example, you can introduce a concept with three benefits. Not only will this help your audience remember your points, but it’ll be easier for you to remember too!

Let your presentation slides support your point, not make it Texts and images are only there to support what you are saying in your video. One of the best ways to do this is by portraying your idea with a simple word or phrase on the slide, then you discuss this deeper while talking. Try not to display more than 15 words per slide - less is more and strong visuals go a long way. Just make sure that your images match with the text and support the concepts you are verbally discussing. Don’t be afraid to fill a whole slide with a picture in order to keep the message focused. Be funny, inspiring, bold, and most of all, make an impact!

Create a consistent look and feel. In a good presentation slide deck, each slide feels like part of the same story. That means using the same or related font, colours and imagery across all your slides. Using slide templates can be a great way to create consistency. I like to create a few slides to hold sample graphic elements and type, then copy what I need from those slides as I go.

Avoid too many animations Animations are tricky to get right. They can slow your presentation, especially if you’re adding a transition animation between each slide which may lead to ‘dead air’ during your video. They may be distracting to your audience while you’re trying to explain something.

However, there are scenarios in which the use of animations makes sense, for example, if you’re highlighting certain functionality of a product, or building a story with illustrations, or even subtly animating graphs or statistics. In those scenarios, the animation helps you with your objective. However, if you’re using animations just for the sake of using animations, it means your presentation is probably better off without any in it at all. Use slide layout to your advantage Most people in the Western world read left to right, top to bottom. Keep this in mind when designing your slides. Keep the most important information top left as that is what people will see first. Use text size and alternating fonts or colors to distinguish headlines from body text.

Keep the colours simple Stick to simple light and dark colors. Brightly coloured text can cause eye strain, so use those colors sparingly. Dark text on a light background or light text on a dark background works best. Try to stick to no more than two text colours per slide. A highlight colour for headings and a body text colour.

Use sans-serif fonts Sans-serif fonts (ie. Helvetica, Tahoma, Verdana) are easier to read on screens (This is a sans serif font; this is a serif font; this is a decorative font). There are plenty of sans-serif options to choose from just keep legibility in mind when you’re making your pick. Try to stick to no more than two fonts in your slides. Fonts have very different personalities and emotional impacts, so make sure your font matches the tone, purpose, and content of your presentation.

Avoid overstyling the text Three of the easiest and most effective ways to draw attention to text are:

• bold • italics • a change in color

Our eyes are naturally drawn to things that stand out, but if you use all of these options in one slide you’ll not know where to look first. Try to only use one of these at a time. Now let’s talk photography and images

If you have been Googling images and using them on your marketing material, you may be breaking the law. Maybe not ‘Breaking Bad’ level breaking the law, but still, nobody wants to find their goofy Insta post picture adorning someone else’s blog post. So please be considerate and follow both the laws AND the rules of common etiquette when using photos, pictures, or artwork that you didn’t create. As of September 2018, Google now provides links to image creator, credit and copyright notice metadata, whenever available for images on Google Images. For more information, see their blog post Image Rights Metadata in Google Images.

The good news is that there are plenty of websites that provide beautiful stock photography. Many of these sites provide images that are free from copyright restrictions or licensed under creative commons public domain dedication, however, some may require attribution which is easy enough to do and will be explained on the site you choose to use.

Well now that’s out of the way, here are 10 free image resources for you to use.

1. Pexels Pexels provides a hand-picked selection of photos uploaded by users or sourced from free image websites, they are high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under their own Pexels license.

2. Unsplash Unsplash provides beautiful, free photos uploaded by their community of pho- tographers. Their images have been used in everything from Apple keynotes to a default theme shipped with WordPress.

3. Styled Stock If you are looking for femininely styled images then Styled Stock is for you – their collection includes clean and fresh images of beauty, desktops, fashion, florals and food

4. StockSnap StockSnap exists to offer beautiful, high-quality stock photos and promise their us- ers an ever-expanding collection of the best, most beautiful stock images for free.

5. Kaboom Pics Every day new photos of the highest quality are added to Kaboompics for use on your blog posts, graphics for your social media accounts or to make your website more appealing – all for free.

6. Reshot Reshot provides images from the world’s best-emerging photographers, hand- picked, non-stocky images to use as you wish to elevate your creative projects. 7. Pixabay Pixabay has a huge collection of over 1 million+ high-quality stock images and videos shared by their community of creatives, sharing copyright-free images and videos. All content is released under their Pixabay License.

8. Foodiesfeed Food photographers from all around the world share their photos to Foodiesfeed, with the objective of ugly sterile stock photos in the online space related to food.

9. Freestocks.org Freestocks.org supplies images that are not clichéd worn-out stock images but rather images that are fresh, up-to-date and versatile in style, for everyday use as well as more complex and specific projects.

10. FOCA Launched in 2014 to share their love of photography with the world, FOCA has taken countless photos and videos and shared them for free to give back to the online community.

I hope you’ll find these resources helpful. If you know of any other free resources let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Great! Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s move on to the practical exercises.

Grab your Week 1 – Creating beautiful slides Exercise Workbook and let’s get started on creating your presentation slides.