Inserting a movie behind text in PowerPoint

Once in awhile when I get a break from doing PowerPoint presentations for clients, I’ll sit down and do one for myself. Imagine that! No, I’m not a glutton for punishment. It’s just that an idea will pop into my head about a certain effect or animation, and I’ll decide to give it a try. On this particular day, I stumbled across some old black and white Laurel and Hardy clips. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this comedic team, they were known for their zany slapstick humor during the late 1920s to the mid-1940s. Presentations these days are full of high tech images and flashy graphics. Sometimes it’s refreshing to think about visual entertainment and how far we’ve come. So I thought it would be fun to put one of these old clips into a PowerPoint slide, say on the history of the Hollywood movie industry. I titled this first slide “Old Movies” and I thought, the “O” in the word Old has a whole in the middle. Wouldn’t it be neat to put the movie clip inside the hole? But movies are rectangular, are they not? Well, sure, but if the movie is behind the O and the corners are covered up by the letter, then you can actually get rounded corners, just like the old fashioned tv screens from the early days of television. The idea worked like a charm. I got such a kick out of this little exercise that I wanted to share it with others on YouTube. You can click on the link below to view the video.Adding video behind word in PowerPoint