A friend of mine works in the NHS. She is an awesome writer, but worries as she struggles to produce video content for her social media channels.
When I sent her this fantastic piece of award-winning kinetic typography written by Thread And Fable, and designed by Lynn PR, she loved it – and responded:
Jeeez, if only I could produce something like that!!??
I think she can – and I want to prove it to her!
I love the dynamic kinetic typography design. I don’t want underestimate the design and animation work that has gone into it, but I want to show her that (using this as inspiration) the technical side can be easier than she thinks. In fact… I think it could be animated (at least with still images) in PowerPoint of all things!
Here’s my version, using stock photos from Canva, and animated in PowerPoint.
How I did it
I started by finding 14 photos that had the same vibe as the videos in the original. I saved them onto a single document in Canva, then exported the whole lot as PNGs.
Then I created each animation as a slide in PowerPoint. I know it seems like an odd choice – but the animation and slide transitions can look really impressive and it is very easy to use! I stuck with Arial (it is really meant as a proof of concept) but you could obviously swap out the fonts for something less vanilla.
Download the final PowerPoint presentation (37MB) to see how it is put together.
The presentation uses a combination of slide transitions (covers, pushes and morphs) and animations (wipes and paths) to move the pictures and text around. The morph transition is a brilliant tool but I suggest using it sparingly – they seem to be a bit memory heavy and can be a little glitchy when you convert to a video.
The last slide (getting the vaccine bottle to appear over the images) was tricky to get my head around – but again I made it work just using PowerPoint. I recreated the bottle silhouette using basic shapes, then grouped them and changed the colour of the shape to white.
Once I had the layout how I wanted it on the slide, I copy and pasted the bottle onto a new black slide, and exported that whole slide as a PNG file. I then added that image back into the presentation and removed the white colour to leave a black image with a hole through the middle in the shape of the vaccine bottle. Effectively creating a mask.
By fading up the transparent mask, then a white shape behind the “hole” I was able to reproduce the bottle shape overlay of the photos, then fade it into white, before adding the animated text over the top.
The hardest part was tweaking the transition times to match the audio (though I’d do it the other way round if I was doing this from scratch). Once you realise that the transition description (wipe etc) applies to the effect coming into the slide that it is chosen on, but the timing of the transition applies to the time before moving on to the next slide. A touch confusing!
Once I’d got the presentation looking how I wanted, I then exported the whole presentation as a video. There’s one slight audio glitch, but as a proof of concept I think it shows what can be done. And it was ALL DONE IN POWERPOINT!
Let me know in the comments what you think of my version – and if you want to share your own video content made in PowerPoint, I’d love to see it!