Download the source files

[highlight]You can also [dlink link=’https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2332114/eLearningArt_GiveAways/AssetsBlog/Angles-Film/Angles-Article-Giveaway/4-Tracking-Shot-Effect.pptx’] download the PowerPoint source files[/dlink] with the animations and the images included and follow along with the lesson.[/highlight]

 

Video Transcript

Hey this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I’m going to show you how to re-create a tracking effect in PowerPoint. So let me just go ahead and show you the effect that you are going to create.

So you have this character and let’s say she is walking from her office to the cube. We did this using still images so it’s not going to be the same as video but it is kind of a cool effect that you can create that makes it look like she’s walking just with two different still images. So let’s go ahead and actually get into the file and I will show you how to do that.

And it is created in PowerPoint and I will give you the source files so you can follow along. You will have both the images in there and the prebuilt animations so you can follow along with the lesson. And if you stick around to the end I have a special bonus for you there as well. So let’s go ahead and get into this.

Let me zoom out a little bit here and let’s go ahead and start with kind of a blank slide with just the images in this and I will strip out the animations. So let me pull out the animations in this and we will start from scratch.

All right so you will see what I have here is two different images. I’ve got the woman character and then I’ve got the background. And really what I did to make her look like she was walking was two different effects.

So I animated it with a teeter effect. So let’s go ahead and go to animations. Add animation. We will have to go down to more options and the teeter is here and I will just click okay. And I know that I want her to teeter more than once so let’s just go ahead and go into that and have her teeter – effect options.

We will have her repeat that five different times for one second. That’s fine. We will figure it out later so that’s kind of what the teeter looks like.

But we also want to make it look like she’s walking so what we need to do is apply a second effect. Let’s go to add animation and we are going to add a motion path. So add a line to her. Right now it defaults to going down and we will go ahead and change that.

So if I drag the end point here… and this is going to be a little bit of trial and error in terms of what looks good and what looks kind of weird. But let’s make it start with previous so it’s doing both the teeter and the motion path at the same time and let’s preview what that looks like.

All right so she… we have kind of a weird effect on here with… Oh look, the timing isn’t right. We want them both to be five seconds so let’s go ahead and make that five seconds. And it looks like it also had a smooth start smooth end which I didn’t want so let’s go back to the effect options, get rid of the smooth start, smooth and so it has kind of one fluid motion and let’s see… I am previewing the one. Let’s preview them both together.

Alright, so now she’s kind of hobbling along there and you can play around with it. You don’t have to use the teeter as well. You could just use a custom motion path as well but I think this works pretty well.

So just like that it’s fine but I think you can do something more interesting by adding some motion into the background as well. It will create a little bit of a parallax effect. So let’s do that.

Let’s go ahead and click on the background. Let’s add an animation. We will do another motion path and we will make this move slightly to the left. So let’s drag the end point of this one. Let’s just move it a little bit just to there. Let’s make it the same length – five seconds. Let’s go to the effect options. Let’s not have the smooth start or smooth end there. Let’s click okay and let’s make sure… I can’t remember if I had made it play with previous or not. Start with previous.

Okay so now let’s look at what happens when we apply all of those together and… yeah. So that little parallax effect I think adds a lot. So it’s really easy to do. That’s all there is to it.

Let’s watch it one more time and you can play around with how long the duration is but if you are using this transition going from… and part of your storytelling going from the office to the cube to maybe talk to somebody over there I think that could work really well instead of just doing a cut from one to the other. So that’s I think that’s pretty interesting.

I do have… if you wanted to take it to the next level you can actually save this out as a movie. So if your authoring tool doesn’t have these motion path effects and you want to record this as a movie and then insert it as a movie you can do that. I have a separate lesson for that.

Thanks for sticking around. As I did mention, I have a bonus for you. I have this free download with a bunch of great files in it so I suggest you can click on the link in the video or if you are on mobile and you need to look at the show notes, the link is there as well.

I’ve also included several recommended videos that are similar to this one and as always, if you could do me a huge favor and like the video that would mean a lot to me. And if you want to see more videos like this in the future as I create them, you can go ahead and subscribe to my channel and you will get notifications when I do create new lessons.

Thanks so much for your time and you have yourself a great day!