Panoramic Animation in Power Point

I’ve been working on a unique Power Point design challenge recently: to create a large panoramic type of animated background for PowerPoint presentation. The idea is to take a large dramatic image of a seascape and have this slowly moving across the opening slide in a presentation in Power Point. My intention with this effect is to create an attention grabbing animated effect to kick off a presentation. We are all quite familiar with animated effects in PowerPoint, there are tons built into the program. However, most of these effects are used in such a way that they appear cartoony or superfluous to the intended communication. I’ve been in presentations in which a presenter actually brought up a slide that they worked hard to create, then it animates, and you can actually here chuckling in the audience as they view the animated effect. Animation is a challenging thing to control. It can very quickly become humorous or even silly, sometimes in the most serious of presentations.

However, the animation tools built into Power Point can be quite powerful if used in the correct way. So, getting back to this specific effect. I’m going to create the slide at a standard PowerPoint presentation size, then place a large format panorama within the slide in such a way that the panorama is considerably wider then the slide itself. After this is done I’m going to experiment with “sliding” this image slowly across the slide by using a very slow motion animation.

As I get further into this project, I will post more detail to the blog, and sample screenshots on the process. And the final PowerPoint animation.