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Video Transcript

Hey this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I’m going to show you how to create a dolly effect in PowerPoint using still images and let me just go ahead and show you the effect.

So basically we will have a guy who is looking like he is walking and the camera is following him as he walks down a hall towards us. And this is all done in PowerPoint and yes it doesn’t look exactly like a movie but we are just trying to re-create the effect in PowerPoint. And I will give you the source files and the animations. The images all there and the animations will be prebuilt so you can follow along with the lesson. But let’s go ahead and get into it.

Now what I have here is… let me open the selection visibility pane so we can see everything.

What I have here is two different images; I have the background image and I have the character image. For this effect to work properly you will need to have the separated so that you can have the motion of the person and the motion of the background be different. But one thing you’re going to need to do is you’re going to need to need to have the background a lot bigger than what the work area is — the slide area. Let me just show you, I have this little zoom box, that’s actually the size of the PowerPoint screen there and you will see how much bigger that background is.

Now I applied a blur effect in PowerPoint which is very easy to do with some picture artistic effects and I can show you that in a different lesson but if your image isn’t big enough and you apply an effect like that, you actually won’t be able to tell that it wasn’t high enough resolution. Plus you are putting the focus more on the character. But let’s go ahead and get into this. So what I have here is…

Let’s just start with duplicating this and stripping out the animations. So let me pull these all out. We’ll delete those.

So now I don’t have any animations. You will see I have the background that’s too big. For the walking effect, what I did was I applied a teeter effect. So if you go to add animation and I think it is in the emphasis. Let me see… teeter.

All right, let’s go to more effects. And there is our teeter. Let’s just click okay. And if we were to preview this right now, that’s the teeter and it is just going to do one. So let’s go ahead and actually apply a few of these. It looks like the selection visibility pane closed. It could affect options on this animation. And let’s go ahead and repeat this five times and it’s going for one second. That’s fine. Okay so now we have the teeter going for five seconds.

So now what we’re trying to do is we are also trying to have him look like he’s walking down the hall so we need to be zooming out. And the way we are going to achieve that is click on the background and we’re going to add an animation and we are going to use the “grow/shrink.” And that’s actually we are going to want to apply a shrink to it so that it is zooming out. So let’s go ahead and go to effect options. We will take this down to… 50% is actually great and now let’s try that.

Okay so now let’s actually start with previous here and let’s see what that looks like. See now the problem is it looks like he is walking diagonally down the hall instead of walking straight down towards it so what we need to do is add a pan effect and also you will see the image ran off the background and that’s fine.

So we need to actually apply kind of a pan effect here. So if we click on the background and we add another animation and we do it as a line and now this is just going to be a little bit of trial and error. You grab the end point and you make it the same height there and let’s just try that and we will see how this works.

It didn’t quite look right so… Oh, you know what? I didn’t apply it to … I didn’t make it start with previous so I did them as two separate animations. Now let’s try it again. So now it will actually do the shrink and the pan at the same time… and that looks funny.

It looks like there was… let’s go to effect options. I think there is… yeah, a smooth start, smooth finish, we want to remove those. And you will see this is how it goes with doing these animations. It just takes a little bit of trial and error.

So that looked better but now the length. The guy is walking longer than the Zoom is happening so let’s go back to our animation pane. Let’s take these and actually make them match five seconds and we will take this and we will make that five seconds. And now let’s try previewing this.

Yeah, hung up a little bit but that’s just my computer. Yeah, that actually looks pretty good.

So that’s how you would create a dolly effect in PowerPoint using still images. If you wanted to take it one more level and needed to record it as a video, you actually can do that and then insert it into any other program and I have a video that shows you how to do that.

But as promised I do have a bonus for you guys. I have some additional character images you can play around with and some backgrounds so you can do more effects like this.

Thanks so much for sticking around and if you could do me a favor and like this video that would mean a whole lot to me so that I know that you guys are enjoying these lessons and if you want to see more lessons like this please take a second and subscribe. I have a few recommendations of other videos here on the screen you click on as well as in the show notes but thank you so much for your time and have a great day.