Don Brittain (pictured to the left) is CEO and
a founder of Instant
Effects, a California company that develops software to visually
enhance presentations, communications, and collaboration.
Dr. Brittain has designed commercial interactive graphics software
for more than two decades, having been VP Research at Wavefront
Technologies and one of the principal architects of 3dsmax from
Autodesk prior to helping found Instant Effects more than four
years ago.
Brittain has a personal interest in bringing the power of interactive
computing and visual communication into mainstream use. He holds
eight patents in interactive graphics and has a PhD in Mathematics
from the University of Pennsylvania.
Geetesh:
Tell us more about how OfficeFX evolved -- how did
you get started with this.
Don:
The founders of Instant Effects come from a background in high-end
special effects and 3D animation software. This software
is used by production studios to communicate emotion, information
and excitement within movies, games, and TV commercials.
With the advent of advanced, yet inexpensive, 3D graphics
hardware, we saw a way to address the desire “the rest
of us” have to use similar high-impact graphics to
improve the visual effectiveness of our PowerPoint presentations.
So, we formed Instant Effects in 2002, and that’s when
OfficeFX was born.
Geetesh:
As advanced graphic capabilities get mainstream,
almost any PowerPoint user could be using OfficeFX -- so how
do you view this expanded user base in the future -- and how
do you believe they should look at OfficeFX so that they can
benefit most from it.
Don:
Although advanced consumer graphics hardware has been around
for years, most business computers are just now gaining the
necessary graphics horsepower to run OfficeFX. Thus, we’re
still in the “early adopter” stage, and hence
the impact when giving an OfficeFX-enhanced presentation
right now is quite high, even when the underlying presentation
is not as well thought-out as it should be.
Of course, that will change in the near future when interactive
dynamic graphics become standard faire for almost all presentations.
At that point, the graphics will only be effective if used
to appropriately complement, augment, and enhance the presentation.
In more detail, the same way we have evolved highly effective
language skills by talking to each other everyday, we have
also mastered an efficient visual communication language
by watching visual media like TV and movies. The challenge
will be learning how to effectively express ourselves using
that language since most of us are only on the receiving
end of dynamic visual communications today.
Geetesh:
Although many products add cutting edge graphics to
PowerPoint content, they really cannot add content -- if there's
no content, there nothing left to be made compelling -- so
how can users be educated about this?
Don:
OfficeFX provides visual impact to PowerPoint content, and
if the content is lacking, there’s not much OfficeFX
can do. You may end up with a lot of “sizzle”,
but we can’t magically create the “steak”.
One of the key ideas in Cliff Atkinson’s excellent
book Beyond
Bullet Points is that a good presentation tells a story.
Here’s where OfficeFX can shine, since Hollywood has
been using visual effects to enhance story telling for decades. When
your talk couples a good story with a visually-compelling
way to tell it, you end up with a great presentation.
Geetesh:
Can you share some success stories of using OfficeFX.
Don:
One success we’re particularly proud of involved a high-level
executive at a Fortune 100 company giving a keynote at an interactive
media conference in Europe. For this important talk, the “story” was
almost completely written before OfficeFX was introduced. Based
on the story, a custom OfficeFX theme was designed to visually
delineate and accent the talk’s main points. The keynote
was very well received and variations were presented at several
subsequent events. Based on the success of this family of presentations,
the CEO of the same company gave a major keynote (on a completely
different topic) using OfficeFX early the next year.
We’re also proud of the fact that OfficeFX has been
well received at major product and program launches. These
are often “million dollar days” where quality
and results mean everything, so the demands on the visual
output are quite high. People are often shocked to find that
OfficeFX, running on a single PC, is the “wizard behind
the curtain”, rather than an army of AV professionals
using expensive real-time event production hardware.
Geetesh:
What does the future hold for OfficeFX -- what can
users look forward to seeing in the near future.
Don:
Although products that enhance PowerPoint’s graphics
have been around for ages, OfficeFX is the first product to
completely render PowerPoint content in an interactive, dynamic
media environment.
The power related to that paradigm shift is enormous. For
example, OfficeFX can be extended through custom themes to
carry a company’s dynamic logos, brands, and colors
consistently throughout a presentation on both the slides
as well as the transitions. Once such a theme is developed,
any number of presentations can be created quickly that have
the same corporate identity and high-impact visual appeal.
Future versions of OfficeFX will build on this foundation
by providing users with more extension and customization
options. In turn, this will allow for more effective story
telling and hence better, more compelling presentations.
We will also be enhancing the ability of our FXD files to
extend the power, portability, and functionality of this
media (which is authored with OfficeFX Professional).
Geetesh:
Can you share some trivia with Indezine readers
-- an unconventional use of OfficeFX, an amusing anecdote,
or just something you want to tell them.
Don:
When you’re the first to venture into a new, emerging
market, it’s interesting to see where “experts” are
right and where they sometimes miss the mark.
In the early days of Instant Effects, we were led to believe
that we’d have to “start near the bottom” in
a large company, and work our way up to having senior management
use OfficeFX.
That has turned out to be backwards in many cases. Senior
executives give more talks where the leading-edge reputation
of their company is at stake, and hence OfficeFX is readily
embraced. Once blessed by senior management, middle management
follows suit, and we see a filter down, rather than a “work
our way up”, effect.
In another instance, a senior US government official overseeing
the military expressed interest in OfficeFX, and suddenly
a set of generals also expressed interest in our software!
Of course, the opposite is true in other cases. For example,
we have had a few “loner” early adopters who
started using OfficeFX to their advantage well before some
of the larger companies had even started their formal evaluations.
