The nightmare returns.....
I recall back in 6th form lessons and tutorial's that contained slide after slide of mundane PowerPoints. It wasn't just the number of the slides, it was the blandness and repetitive style of these, with a fair degree of " read the screen" in Calibri 12. I bet the majority , regardless of how academic they were, actually absorbed the content, if I am honest I certainly had to force myself to keep focused after 20th slide!
Turning the nightmare in to a dream...well not really but maybe a better experience
I have two projects underway, each has a PowerPoint requirement, I'll be honest here I almost feel physically sick with public speaking and much prefer to be "behind the scenes- behind camera", regardless though the content is always done.
We've been introduced to Pencha Kucha style and one of these presentations has to be in that format. It's a sync'd - timed speech ( I'm dreading this bit) with content using pictures as a form of story telling. It actually makes you think about what you are trying to "tell" or "inform" with the presentation. this is certainly challenging as sometimes it's easy to go with the monotonous bulleted facts- data , graphs and maybe a bit of picture fly-in animation. This style actually prevents you form doing so, it challenges you to think differently.
Savage, C. 2019 offers that :-
Pecha Kucha is a presentation form of 20 images for 20 seconds. The slides change automatically and the speaker must synchronise their speech with the images. It’s sometimes also called a 20×20 presentation. So the entire presentation always lasts for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds.
And that's the challenge , do I want simple images or do I want a bit of creative thought, it would be very ODD given my undergrad course if I didn't be, or at least try to be, creative.
So I had an idea
One of the two PowerPoints is to highlight a positive from a negative context, e.g. " mess up" implies something has gone wrong or it could be "messing ( participation) in a dirty sport such as rugby , Tough Mudder etc.
I wanted the text " statement" to be the picture rather than text with a picture.
So how could I do this.
A bit of head scratching, trial and error, YouTube, and a pack of Cheeto's later I had the method more or less sorted. Loosely this is:-
Blank PPT
Create a text box
Large font, centralise and stretch as per preference ( I added some shapes to the text in the form of arrow heads)
Overlay with a rectangle
Send Rectangle to back
With rectangle still highlighted, click text box and any shapes you added in this order only!, select merge shapes( this is in the shape format tab) and select " subtract"
This leaves you with a "shape" rather than a text box, with the " text cut out".
Insert an image, and send to back
crop, stretch etc to suit
Right click the "shape" and add preferred colour for the background
then check and refine by reviewing in prestation mode
First time doing this, I think it came out ok in the end
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