You might have watched a trailer or two in your internet travels. Maybe the latest phone was just announced, or your favourite show just landed a new season on Netflix. Now you want to create one of those fancy videos, with fast video clips and just a couple of words of text but you don’t have the very expensive video software that the “pros” use.
If you have PowerPoint, however, you are in luck because you can create a video just like this one.
So how do you do it?
The "Be Kind To" introduction
Start with adding your soundtrack of choice and make sure to set it to play across slides. You can place it off screen.
Type your text, in this case you will be typing “BE”. Make it as big as you would like it to appear on screen and align to the center of the slide.
Then create a rectangle spanning the entire slide. Find the Merge Shapes command and select Combine. You should end up with a rectangle with a hollowed out “BE” in the middle.
Repeat the same process for the word KIND and the word TO. As each rectangle needs to be as big as the entire slide, it might be easier to place each word on a separate slide at the beginning, so you don’t cover the other elements.
Now is the time to insert your video into the first slide. Set playback to Automatically. Make sure the video is in the background, below the word “BE”.
Copy the “KIND” rectangle and paste on top of the “BE” rectangle, and do the same for “TO”. The end result is one slide with the video at the back, with the “BE” layer above it, followed by the “KIND” layer and then the “TO” layer.
Let’s say we want the introduction to last a total of 6 seconds. Select your video, go to Playback, and then click on Trim Video. Set the length of the video to be 6 seconds – this is important because it will determine how long PowerPoint will stay on the slide.
Then open your Animation Pane, make sure you have both your Selection Pane and Animation Pane open. Select the “BE” rectangle and set it to Disappear at 2 seconds. Then select the “KIND” rectangle and set it to Appear, make sure the timing is set to “With Previous” so that it appears when the “BE” disappears. Add a Disappear animation for the “KIND” rectangle after 4 seconds. Then select the “TO” rectangle and set it to Appear “With Previous” so that TO appears when KIND disappears.
Your Animation Pane will look something like this.
That’s it, your intro is done. Your Intro will last 6 seconds, and a new word will appear every two seconds, starting with BE.
The rest of the Video
The intro was the more complicated part, the rest is quite simple. At this point you should just have one intro slide with the video and the three words laid on top of each other. Now you just need to insert the rest of your videos into slides, one video per slide.
Once again, make sure that the playback is set to “Automatically” and that the videos are trimmed to the desired length. For example, if you want the videos to stay on screen for 3 seconds, make sure you trim them down to 3 seconds.
Type the desired text on top of your videos.
Finally, set all slide transitions to “None”.
Et voilà, you are done.
A note on timings
If you are planning to time the videos to the music’s beat, you have to go through a bit of a trial and error process, adjusting the trimming of the videos until they fit. Another possibility is to use the bookmark options in the Audio panel to mark points of interest in the soundtrack. I’ll let you experiment with those options to find what works best for you.
Download the original Ppt file
To download the original Be Kind video click on the link below.
