Shawn Toh (pictured to the left) started creating PowerPoint presentations since secondary school and his interest in PowerPoint animations kept growing. Shawn loves to do advanced animation tricks using PowerPoint.
In this conversation, Shawn discusses animation in PowerPoint and his PowerPoint Heaven site.
Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself and PowerPoint Heaven.
Shawn: I have graduated from the Singapore Polytechnic with a diploma in Business Information Technology with merit and has enrolled into the National University of Singapore. During my free time, I work as a freelance presentation consultant where I do project consultations, conduct workshops, trainings and speaking engagements with companies and schools.
I have been actively participating in the Microsoft Office Discussion Group for PowerPoint (under the alias "tohlz") and has been working closely with Korea's PowerPoint Expert Club.
Geetesh: PowerPoint Heaven is distinctly different from other PowerPoint sites since it looks more at drawing and animation in PowerPoint – what made you choose this direction?
Shawn: PowerPoint Heaven is both an entertainment and educational site that offers you with advanced animations and PowerPoint works. You will be able to find works such as PowerPoint games, artworks, anime, and even web-comics. On this site, the goal is to show users that PowerPoint is not simply a presentation tool, but is also capable on leveraging into other areas such as creating games, artworks and animations comparable to those created in Adobe Flash and Photoshop.
The aim of this site is to create the WOW factor and go beyond the capability of PowerPoint, where visitors entering PowerPoint Heaven will get amazed by the works featured on the site. And through this site, users can get to learn how these advanced works are done by accessing the tutorials section.
PowerPoint Heaven started off as a personal site, where I published my tutorials and works. Being more animation and entertainment focused, PowerPoint Heaven started off with showing works that are unique from other PowerPoint sites and has greatly shown the differences. Thus, the site began receiving more exposure, and has attracted people who are interested in contributing to PowerPoint Heaven.
Glen Millar (pictured to the right) is a MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for Microsoft PowerPoint. Based near Brisbane, Australia, Glen is a regular on the Microsoft support newsgroups, and a featured speaker at PowerPoint Live. Visit Glen's site, PowerPoint Workbench for tutorials on cool animation effects in PowerPoint.
Geetesh: Tell us more about your work, and your involvement with PowerPoint..
Glen: I first began to use PowerPoint a number of years ago to present scientific information. It was critical that we could communicate effectively, as well as efficiently. I discovered that PowerPoint is a very powerful way to help people communicate. It allowed us to span information across time and locations. That is, we could take our audience to locations and across time in ways that simply cannot be done in real life.
Today, I work in a bunch of areas, including environmental education projects. I particularly build presentations for clients and conduct computer training into the features of PowerPoint that allow clients to build presentations faster and more effectively. I still think it is an awful shame that people spend lots of money on their projects and go to a conference and give a very poor presentation.
Geetesh: Tell us about your false background trick, and how you evolved it. Also what are typical usage scenarios for this trick?
Glen: False backgrounds take advantage of a property of AutoShapes that allows the shape to grab pixels from the slide background and lock them into place. The first time I created a false background was almost by accident. I was preparing for PowerPoint Live in 2004 and wanted to use an AutoShape to pan across the background image of a slide. However, every time I animated the AutoShape to move, it would take the background image with it. I learnt that if I covered the slide background, I could produce some amazing effects such as cropping, highlights and very cool animations. I mainly used the effect to crop multiple parts of an image and apply animations to them.
With the advent of PowerPoint 2007, the effects are even more amazing. When I have shown them to people, they don’t believe I didn’t use an external image editor. For example, a common comment at PowerPoint Live in New Orleans was that people had spent hours in external programs to create image effects that could be done easier and more accurately right within PowerPoint 2007.
I currently use this technique in a number of situations. I mentioned cropping of images. That is, I place an AutoShape over a strategic part of an image on the slide background and the shape drills through the false background in between. This allows a very powerful image crop to occur, but that is only the beginning!
The PowerPoint Expert Club is among the largest PowerPoint cafes in Korea. Their new Intro Animation Contest requires participants to create a showcase in PowerPoint with the club/cafe as the topic. The main criteria for the winners will be based on PowerPoint animations -- submitted works will be judged through members' voting. The current, top two submissions are now available on PowerPoint Heaven, the site of Microsoft MVP Shawn Toh.
The winning entry for Intro Animation Contest 1 is by Coolguy7, which can be found here...
