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: • Prezi • Google Slides • 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 Microsoft Office 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.