Episode: 4458
Title: HPR4458: Creating an animation in Powerpoint
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4458/hpr4458.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:53:58

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4458 for Wednesday 3 September 2025.
Today's show is entitled Creating an Animation and PowerPoint.
It is part of the series business applications.
It is hosted by Dave Hingley and is about 9 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is how I created a short animation in PowerPoint.
Hi, welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
In this episode, I want to talk about a technique I've just put together for a PowerPoint presentation,
which I thought might be useful for you, dear listener.
Okay, so here's the background.
I've been working on a presentation about agile development.
I've looked at all the resources and various other people's presentations on agile.
And they always show agile the same way.
You show a circular picture with arrows connected to each other,
and then you show a series of those unnatural products.
There's your sprints and there's your product at the end, which is, it's okay.
It's very conceptual though, and I don't think it really helps to sell what an agile process is like.
I'd seen someone give us a similar presentation about the creation of creating a car by agile.
I thought there's an interesting way of doing it, but they were using this sort of circular icon to demonstrate it.
So I thought I would try to make a piece of animation that played from within a PowerPoint presentation,
showing the creation of a car via agile.
So I split the animation with three components, three sections.
The first section is the assignments of the brief.
The first section is the creation of the minimal viable product, and the first section is the iteration.
So the first slide, the establishment of the brief, that's just going to be a couple of bunch of graphics.
So I designed a client character and project management character,
and a couple of the graphics, a speech balloon with a picture of a car inside it.
And this is all very stylized, sort of minimalist animation.
And that was my first slide.
Slide two and three have animation on, and here's where the technique starts.
So the minimum amount of time for an effect in PowerPoint is a quarter of a second.
So you can do four things in a second, which means that you're running four frames, potentially four frames per second.
So the way this technique would work is you would have a bunch of graphics appear with the appear animation commander.
Then you would have another set of animations that would appear a quarter of a second after the first lot.
And then you can add the disappear animations to the first lot of things, if that makes any sense.
So imagine frame one appears, so all your assets are frame one.
So you've got frame assets appear.
Court for a second later, the frame two assets appear.
And once you do that, you then add a series of disappear animations commands to disappear the first frame assets.
And you can keep going through an animation, going frame one, frame two, frame three.
You know, each time disappearing the assets that were there before.
It's a rudimentary animation, and you can't get faster than a quarter of a fourth frame per second.
But it does mean that you can create interesting animations that happen from within the frame.
If they happen, sorry, within the slide.
And then you can combine that with other things.
So our first example, creation of the minimum available product, I have a graphic of the project manager that stays there constantly.
And then a second afterwards, we introduce the first icon, which is going to be, say, some wheels.
And then a court for a second after that, we introduce the second icon.
And then a second after that, we introduce the third icon.
So that's kind of the engine block and the steering wheel.
And so all we're doing is we create those sequence.
And all those other two icons, they are, their starts are queued for a second after the first one is triggered.
So all you're doing is setting when you want that first frame to happen.
So you might put a delay.
So as soon as the slide takes over, as soon as the slide appears, wait a second, bring up the first icon.
And the other two icons will just appear a second, a court of a second later or a second later, depending on your duration.
Well, that's fine. And we expand on that for the third one.
So for the third slide, where we're actually iterating on the minimum viable product, I've got five different states for the client, five different states for the car and five different states for the project manager.
And so we toggle them, well that's the other.
So we start for the first, you know, the first second, as soon as the slide appears, we give it a second.
And then we toggle off the first frame, toggle on the second frame.
Then we toggle off the second frame and toggle on the third frame.
Until we get to the end, where the client has got, I mean, the minimum viable product that he's happy with.
And that was great, but I figured it needed a little bit more.
So I wrote, I drew a couple more frames of animation that we could just tack on the end of something called the smear drawing.
So it's an animation technique if you want to show something moving very quickly across a screen.
You smear the drawing. It's like adding motion blur, but we did a couple of, I did a couple of smear drawings, which then put the project manager into the car.
So, you know, you have the project manager, you have two smear drawings, and then we switch the car and delete the project manager.
So you have the project manager in the car.
And then we can then wait to set half a second.
And then we can just simply add a motion path to that graphic and just have the car drive off the slide.
I would say, well, first up, I drew all the artwork on a tablet.
I've got a 2014 Samsung Galaxy tablet, a 10-inch tablet.
I was running a piece of software called FlipperClip, which is free, although I've paid, it's free, but you can pay to unlock it, I've unlocked it.
It's great for doing two-denimation, look for that.
I've produced all the states, all the different graphic states for all the characters, and got to write that out as a 17 frame PNG sequence.
Once I've got it as a PNG sequence, I take it onto my laptop, in Increta, I crop them into individual components,
so say all of the project magic components, all of the client components, all of the MVP components, and that way I can arrange them on the slide,
so they type the sync up, and they take the right amount of space.
I would say it took about an hour to put the slides together.
The creation of the artwork was about another hour or so, but I did that on the week, I did that on an evening.
Literally, we were watching Death in Paradise, and I was just drawing out of it, and the animation for that was done in an hour.
That's drawn inked, coloured, and exported.
Ten minutes to crop the artwork, and then about in the hour to put it all together.
It's tricky. The only tricky aspect is you have to keep track of all the different states that are happening in the animation pane in PowerPoint.
There's no real easy solution for that.
If you select one of your graphics on the slide, it will highlight all the animation that's got on it in the animation panel,
so you can see that it toggles on here and toggles off there, or it toggles on and doesn't toggle off, so you need to toggle our state, for example.
You can preview the animation in the slide itself, so you haven't got a slot for the whole presentation to get to this slide.
You can just test that slide at that point, and that's useful.
I think this makes for an engaging slide to help demonstrate and illustrate the concept of Agile Project development.
I hope you find that interesting. Maybe if you guys are doing a presentation, you can think about possibly using the way to trigger animations internally as opposed to trying to slap video everywhere.
Just move for some to think about. Take care, bye now.
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