Create-Amazing-Clip-Art-Animation
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1 Partha Bhattacharya 2 Create Amazing Clip Art Animation Video in PowerPoint Copyright © 2014 Partha Bhattacharya First Edition: May 2012 Revised: February 2014 This is a work of technical guidance for do-it-yourself web video makers and web marketers. Care is taken to make the information contained in this book complete, correct, and easy to follow and implement. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Author, Partha Bhattacharya. 3 About This Book I am often reminded the adage, it is easy to make things simple provided you know how to do it. Man goes a long way finding out ways and means to communicate as best as he can, but often overlooks what he can do easily and effectively. This in a nutshell describes this book. The web today is now in a position where video communication has become necessary. Whatever the purpose, there has to be a video for that. The good news is that you can make a video easily. This book shows how you can create amazing videos using simple clip arts in PowerPoint. 4 Clip arts, or cartoons if you like, are great communicators. In this book you will learn how to easily animate clip arts to make eye-popping PowerPoint videos. And then upload them to YouTube. Writing any book is a learning experience for the author, and it helps to listen from the readers of the book about their experience in following the concepts explained in the book. So, as much as you, the reader, learn from this book, I also learn as an author from your experience. Please write to me at [email protected] and tell your story about this book. 5 About The Author Partha Bhattacharya specializes in planning and creating web content. He offers training and consultation to small entrepreneurs on WordPress, SEO, content writing, e- learning business, web video making, and self-publishing on Amazon. Partha has authored several ebooks for small web business, and is the founder of HubSkills.Com where he writes helpful tips and suggestions for d-i-y web entrepreneurs. Partha may be contacted at [email protected] or at following websites. hubskills.com youtube.com/hubskills facebook.com/hubskills 6 Table of Contents Chapter 1: What Is a Clip Art? Chapter 2: Sourcing Clip Arts for Animation Chapter 3: Breaking Up WMF Clip Art into Small Elements Chapter 4: Editing & Animating Small Vector Elements Chapter 5: Getting Inspired…Tell Your Story with Clip Art Video Chapter 6: Uploading Your Clip Art Video to YouTube 7 1/ What Is a Clip Art? Clip art is a creation by hand. According to Wikipedia, clip art refers to pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. In the present times, most clip art is created, distributed, and used in electronic form. This means that the clip arts that we normally see on the web are mostly made with computer software. Here are a few examples, courtesy Wikipedia (Figure 1). 8 Figure 1 A great source for clip arts is the Open Clipart, which is a large collaboration community with a collection of more than 50,000 clip arts as of this writing. Most of the clip arts in Open Clipart are released to the public domain and may be used in any project for free and with no restrictions. 9 If you are a clip art enthusiast, Open Clipart offers the opportunity to test your skill by editing a clip art in online editors. The following image in SVG format gives an example of that (Figure 2). You can find it here. Figure 2 10 Clip arts usually come in 3 formats, all of which are vector file formats. They are the Adobe’s EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), Microsoft’s WMF (Windows Metafile), and the more recent SVG format (Scalable Vector Graphics) brought out by the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. In this book we will concentrate on the WMF format from Microsoft and other sources. Compared to the other two, WMF is much simpler though less sophisticated vector file format. Let me briefly take you down the memory lane of the history of clip arts. In the old days people drew illustrations of what they see and feel around them, and they did them on various medium including using carbon pencils on papers. It is generally acknowledged that illustrations, rather than the words to describe the subject, tell stories more vividly (remember the saying, a picture is worth thousand words), and so they are considered as being useful and practical in the learning of new things and ideas. 11 For example the following illustration of Bathing in the Ganges by AS Forrest nicely brings forth the use of the river Ganges by the people in India. You could read a whole essay on it, but this superb illustration would surely remain in your memory for a long time. As an aside, though this sketch must be quite an old work of art, what is interesting is that the practice it depicts is still prevalent in the large parts of India. Figure 3 12 Before we venture to the next chapter, let me put the aim of this book in perspective. As a video maker you’ll need to rely on pictures, graphics, illustrations, and the like to drive home the message contained in a video. This is important to understand because if you don’t use a video camera – which you probably won’t for most training videos - you need to be a bit innovative to make your video stand out in the crowd. Clip arts help you do that. And if you can animate the clip art…well, nothing like it! We will start our journey by knowing the various sources of clip arts that you can animate. Over to the next chapter! 13 2/ Sourcing Clip Arts for Animation In the previous chapter we discussed that most clip arts that are used on the web are in vector file formats. Vector graphics combine the use of geometrical objects like point, line, curve, shape and polygon, and are therefore based on mathematical expressions to represent images in computer graphics. In simple terms, a vector image is much superior to the pixel-based raster image for the following important reasons: Small file size because of minimal information transmitted Making changes like moving, scaling, rotating, filing, etc. do not degrade the quality of the image Images can be zoomed in, and still remain smooth 14 You may, for its inherent quality, import a small-sized clip art, and then resize it to fit into your layout without the fear of it getting distorted. We will be using clip arts in WMF format (Windows Metafile). Since the time Microsoft introduced it as a 16-bit vector format for use with Windows 3.0 in Word, PowerPoint and Publisher, WMF has become a popular medium for making illustrations. When used in PowerPoint, it is possible to break up a WMF vector image into small elements. And upon doing so, each element can be further edited and animated independent of the rest of the elements or the image as a whole. Sounds confusing? Don’t worry. We shall shortly go into actually doing it. Before that let’s look at some sources of WMF clip arts on the web which you can use for your animation video in PowerPoint. 15 WMF Clipart A favorite destination for me, WMF Clipart has a fairly large collection to offer for free. The site declares: Here you will find free clip art pictures, collected from various internet sites and newsgroups, with permissions. All these free clip arts are in public domain, royalty free and can be freely used by anybody. There are many categories to help you select the one you want. When you choose a clip art, the image appears something as under (Figure 4). 16 Figure 4 There are 2 images here. One is the GIF image of the green-colored car that the browser displays. The second one is the small square shown by the arrow, which is the WMF file that the browser cannot display. 17 Right-click on this and then select Save image as.. The image can be saved only in WMG, so save it on your computer. Clipart.Com Clipart.com is arguably the largest online collection of royalty-free clipart, photos, vinyl- ready images, Web graphics, illustrations, fonts and sounds. You get the chance of downloading up to 250 clipart images per week but you have to be a paid subscriber to avail the opportunity. Subscription amount varies from $12.95 a week to $139.95 for a full year (as of this writing). At Clipart.com when you select an image for use, you may be able to download it in different formats including WMF (Figure 5). Without doubt the quality of the clip arts is really good in Clipart.com. And so if you are a serious user, consider becoming a subscriber in the site. 18 Figure 5 19 Inserting Clipart in PowerPoint 2010 You can insert a clip art in PowerPoint in mainly 2 ways. By searching and collecting clip art from outside of PowerPoint like one from WMF Clipart (discussed above) By searching and inserting clip art from within PowerPoint 2010. These are those among the 1000s of illustrations, photos, animations and sounds in the repository of Microsoft Office. Following is the example of a resizable clip art (Figure 6) that is just 17 KB in size and has the dimensions 1727 (w) x 1990 (h).