Kathy's |
ABC ~ All
'Bout Computers Boom! -
Blowing Up Pictures in PowerPoint When you think of the term "blowing up" two things come to mind:
Both of these techniques can be done to a picture in PPT. What's more, both have uses in many different types of presentations. This two-part article will show you how to blow up your pictures in both ways. Blowing Apart a PictureHave you ever wanted to have a picture appear on your screen as one thing and then blow apart to separate elements? It is a great technique for explaining parts of a process, photo, or structure in detail. We are going to step through blowing apart pictures, but this same idea can be used for expanding organization charts, process diagrams, and all kinds of other elements. Open a presentation (new or existing) and add an empty new slide. Change the layout of this slide to either title only or blank. Use Insert--> Picture to add the photograph to be blown apart to the center of the slide. (You can move it later, but it is easiest to start the process with the elements in the center of the slide.)
Select the picture and copy it several times. I made six copies for my example, you can do more or less. Drag the copies off to the side so that you can work with each in turn. Select the copies and the original and format them so that they each have a visible border. (Believe me - this will help while putting the pieces together.) Select the original and give it an emphasis animation and an exit animation. The emphasis I used was blast. The exit I used was fade. (This is easier to do here than later, since the original copy isn't covered up yet.) Select one copy and line it up over the top of the original picture. On the Picture toolbar, click the crop tool. It looks like a pair of x's that overlap and off-set so that there is a blank area in the middle. When you do select the crop tool, crop marks will appear at each corner of your picture. Using the crop marks, cut the picture down to a rectangle that covers about an eighth or a little more of the picture. Select the next picture, drag it over the main picture and repeat the crop process. This time, select another area of the picture to show. Repeat with each of the copies. Copies can overlap each other, but make sure that all of the picture is covered by one of the cropped copies.
We are now ready to make the picture blow apart. Bring up the custom animation task pane. For each piece, you need to add two animations: an entrance animation and a motion path. The entrance animation I used for each piece was expand. The motion path animation will send the piece to the outer edges of the slide. (I drew straight line motion paths for each in this example. If you want to fancy it up, use zigzags or other paths.) Set all the animations to happen "With Previous".
You are now ready to fine tune your explosion. You may find that the animation timing and effects are just what you want by default. However, if you want the effects to look more realistic, you will likely need to nudge the timings on some of the animations. The best way to do this is to view the advanced timeline (right click the animation pane and select Show Advanced Timeline). Once the timings show as bars, you can adjust starting times, ending times, and length of animation as desired. The final step in the blow apart process is to turn off the white borders. Select all the picture pieces, format them and set the lines back to none. I created a short presentation that shows the steps above. You can download it and view it (providing you have PPT 2002 or later) from here. Tip: Want to make this even more impressive? Use a drawing program to create different shapes for each of the pieces. Be sure to save the pieces as either transparent gifs or transparent pngs. When you do this, you have the ability to make the shapes anything you want. The more irregular the shapes, the more impressive and realistic it looks. The sixth slide in the sample presentation shows what I was able to do by creating the pieces in Paint Shop Pro. Blowing Up a PictureThe process for blowing up a picture involves using PPT's animations to shrink, grow, and move the picture so that it looks like you are zooming in on the picture. Before we start on the actual process of animating the picture to blow it up, you need to adjust your thinking to how Powerpoint thinks. In order to blow up a picture, you need to grow it. In order to pan a picture you need to apply a motion path to it. That part works just as you would expect. What works backwards is that to pan the picture left, you need to move it right. To pan a picture up, you need to move it down. It doesn't make sense on first read, but as we set up the example you will see that it does work. Open a presentation (new or existing) and add an empty new slide. Change the layout of this slide to either title only or blank. Use Insert--> Picture to add the photograph to be blown up to the center of the slide. (You can move it later, but it is easiest to start the process with the elements in the center of the slide.)
Notice that when I inserted the picture it was bigger than the slide. Normally, we would want to optimize the picture so that it fit nicely and wasn't over-scanned. In this case, though, we want the extra detail. That extra detail is going to let us blow up the picture without inserting it a second time. The next thing we need to do is to put a shape over the slide so that the people watching the show don't see the magic we are about to do. Add a rectangle the size of your slide and set it to have no line and a background fill. Right click the object and choose Order--> Bring to Front.
Select the picture and bring up the Custom Animation task Pane. Set the emphasis animation for the picture to be Grow/Shrink Very Fast, with Previous. Change the Size parameter for the animation to be either smaller or tiny. (I chose smaller.) Next, select the box and give it an exit animation of Disappear After Previous. When you run this slide, the picture will shrink behind the box, then the box will exit and the picture will show in its smaller state. The slide and animation pane will look like this:
Now we are ready to blow up this picture. Select the picture and give it a second emphasis animation of Grow/Shrink. This time, set the size parameter to Larger. This will set the percentage to 150%. However, this is not 150% of the original size. It is 150% of the current size. In effect, this blows up the picture to it's original size. (If you want to see this effect in extreme, set the size to Huge (400%). With the picture I used, this blows up the picture so that vertically about all that shows is the boy from just above his head to just above his knees. When this last animation was added, it was set to start On Click. I left it that way to make it easy to see the difference between the entrance animations and the blowing up of the picture. You may want to add a time delay instead. What if I want to blow up a different part of the picture?Blowing up a different part of the picture is done by moving the picture so that the new piece is in the center of the slide. You can do this by applying a motion path to run along with the second grow/shrink animations. In my example, I added a motion path that moved the picture up and to left. This panned the picture so that the boy's shoes and the grass showed instead of his head. I then set the motion path to start with previous so that the pan and the blow up happened over the same timeframe. At this point, the slide and the animation task pane look something like this: (Note: I moved the background fill rectangle to the back of the slide to make the screen shot of the motion path clearer.)
If you want to, play around with the different motion paths and see what they do when combined with the grow/shrink animation. Some of the combinations can provide interesting effects! I created a short presentation that shows the steps above. You can download it and view it (providing you have PPT 2002 or later) from here. The author wishes to thank Glen Millar for his great animation skills. His presentations at PowerPoint Live show all of us what can be done with animations. The ideas here are built off of what Glen has shown can be done. Kathryn Jacobs,
Microsoft MVP, PowerPoint and OneNote Get OneNote answers at http://www.onenoteanswers.com/ Cook anything outdoors with http://www.outdoorcook.com Kathy is a trainer, writer, Girl Scout, parent, and whatever else there is time for.
|
|
|||||
,
