Slide animation Essay Example for Free

Slide animation Essay Successful presenting entails focusing on important points, controlling the flow of information, and holding the audience’s interest in the presentation. We can include two types of animation — within a slide and from slide to slide. Animation on a slide, often called builds, determines how and when objects on the slide appear. Animation from slide to slide, called transitions, specifies how a new slide appears after the previous slide disappears. The last version of the PowerPoint includes powerful animation effects and features. Animation can certainly enliven a presentation, but too much animation will distract the audience from the main message. All professionals make the same point about animation — pick one or two effects and stick to them. This principle applies to both animation on a slide and transitions between slides. Animating objects has an additional purpose — to focus the audience’s attention on what one is saying. To animate a slide, one needs to know what he is going to say while that slide is displayed — and in what order. He then uses that order to determine the order in which the objects appear on the slide. Object animation is sometimes called a build because the objects build up on the screen, one after another. One can control the following aspects of the animation: †¢ How the object appears. †¢ In what grouping the object appears. For example, text most often appears paragraph by paragraph but can appear by the word or even by the letter. †¢ Whether the animation occurs when one clicks the mouse or automatically after a preset number of seconds. †¢ Whether a sound plays during the animation. †¢ What happens, if anything, after the animation. For example, one can change the color of a previously displayed object when the next object appears or hide it completely. For a quick solution, PowerPoint offers animation schemes — a complete group of settings that one can quickly assign to a slide or presentation. Animation schemes apply only to slide titles and text placeholders. To animate other objects the custom animation is used. Several animation schemes also include slide transitions. When one animates placeholder text, all the text in the placeholder is considered one object. However, it is automatically animated paragraph by paragraph — that is, bullet by bullet, which is usually what is wanted. To animate by word or even letter, the custom animation is used too. For more control over animation, than the animation schemes proposed one need to create own settings. New features of custom animation include attaching more than one animation type to an object, animating an object along a path, and animating an object when another object is clicked. The number of the animation options that are included is vast. One can also animate objects such as AutoShapes and text boxes. Because these objects often serve to draw attention anyway, adding animation to them only increases the effect. One can animate WordArt text too. Another type of animation controls how each new slide appears. Because these effects control the transition from one slide to another, they are called transitions. While some of these effects have the same names as animations, they look quite different when applied to an entire slide. Transitions, like slide animation, has to be used with reserve. Many options are available, but that doesn’t mean that one should use them all in one presentation. One of the best solutions is to choose a simple transition and apply it to every slide in the presentation. If the presentation is divided into sections, one could use a second transition to introduce each new section.