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How to turn a lifeless PowerPoint into a lively video

September 28th, 2009  by miki  Filed Under Faculte, Presentations, Video  

Imagine this. You have to train a sales rep on a new product offering OR you need to educate new hires on your company culture and inner workings. How would you do it? Let me guess… a PowerPoint Presentation is the first thing that comes to mind. Well isn’t that exciting (note sarcastic tone). Ok, Ok, don’t be embarrassed… most people will think of PowerPoint as their go-to tool. There always seems to be this love-hate affair with it. We know its easy (relatively) to create and is synonymous with a presentation. But we also know that it can be excruciatingly boring and tedious to go through both for the producer and viewer.

Now think of video. Go on… visualize a video. Most likely it’s much more entertaining than a PPT. So why don’t you use video instead? Oh it’s time consuming? Oh and expensive too? Nonsense!

When people think of video they either think of professionally produced hollywood-style masterpieces or low-quality user-generated chatter on YouTube. For training a sales rep or onboarding new hires, video just seems like too much.

That really shouldn’t be the case. Producing video for business should be as easy as creating a PowerPoint. In fact, it should be easier! That was our central theme when we presented at last week.

Now, I’m not asking you to toss those PowerPoints out the window and start from scratch. Think of your PPTs as a head-start. You have content to work with! Great! Now I’ll give you a few tips to turn them into videos. Start by uploading your PowerPoint into our Broadcast Studio. That itself will make it available online and allow it to be played like a video. Now for some tips to make it really feel like a video:

Narrate over as if you are presenting to an audience

The key here is to not read your PowerPoint. Talk over it hitting on some key points, but feel free to make your talk more free form. Also be mindful of the time you spend on each page. From experience, 15-20 seconds is great to aim for. Of course some pages will just have too much information to fit in that time, which leads me to the next tip.

Annotate (Draw, Sketch and Doodle)

You can increase the attention span of your viewer through movement. That’s where you take the pen tool in the Broadcast Studio and underline keywords, draw lines as callouts, draw little arrows, exclamation marks or circle things.

Use transitions that fit your content

I create stories through PowerPoints and use the wipe transition to give the story a timeline effect. Similarly, you can choose different transitions that turn your PPT into a narrative.

Record yourself through your webcam

Humans are social creatures. We learn better and are more engaged when there is a real person talking to us. Add videos in between pages to mix things up and change the flow. I recommend at least having one opening video introducing the content and a closing video to wrap things up.

Use music and draw to it

Who says you have to talk? Some pages may be a diagram or self-explanatory. Try uploading a short music file and just drawing over your content to the music.

All these 5 tips can be done directly in our Broadcast Studio, so there are no more excuses! Next time you think PowerPoint presentation, stop immediately. That will limit you in so many ways. Always, always, always think video.

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