Notes on Special Effects for Video Creations

A word about special effects. Glitzy text, graphics, video, PowerPoint makes it easier and easier to put together flashy presentations and animation, all that. But here's the challenge. If your audience is coming to you and they're primarily focused on looking at a screen with lots of animation and special effects, at some level, they're comparing your presentation to the latest Star wars movie or other Hollywood blockbuster where hundreds of millions of dollars were spent making that movie. No matter how much time and energy and effort you spend on the special effects of your PowerPoint presentation, I'm pretty certain it's not gonna stack up well compared to the latest Star wars movie. My advice? Spend that time and energy on all this graphic stuff, actually having an interesting presentation and rehearsing. There's a finite amount of time, energy, money for any presentation. In my experience, the people who spend their time with some kind of glitzy special effects, dissolves, animation, are always the ones who, who never have time to rehearse their PowerPoint presentation. And again, the problem is, even if someone looks at it for a minute and says, oh, wow, that's really cool, they instantly forget it. Because we're all bombarded with special effects graphics all day long. Every tv, every computer screen, every news broadcast, every Hollywood production, lots and lots of fancy production values. So if they're comparing you on the basis of fancy production values, that's not a battle you're going to win. I'd much rather someone compare me speaking to the really boring speaker before me and boring speaker after me. That's a battle I can win every time. So I would recommend, unless there's a really, really good reason, like if you're a special effects design company and you're giving a bid proposal to someone on why they should hire you, by all means put a lot of special effects in your presentation. But if you're not in a specific industry like that and you're trying to convey fundamental ideas, I would recommend you focus on one idea per slide. One image. Forget the animation, forget the video, forget the music, sound effects, all that. People hear sound effects and music all day long. You're not going to impress them with that. Allow them to focus on your idea. That frees up time, energy, resources to actually do the thing you don't want to do, but will be helpful, practicing and rehearsing your presentation on video until you're great and doing things like testing your presentation to make sure it works.