Rescuing A PPT

First off, let me just say congrats to the grads of 2009 from my school! This will be the last grad class from Grand Centre High School as we're moving to a beautiful new facility in September! It's the last day of school and I was inspired to write this in my bed on my iPod touch. Sad, I know.

A grad came to me yesterday and asked for some help exporting a PowerPoint presentation to a DVD. The PPT was a simple slideshow of each grad as a baby as well as their grad photo which will loop on a screen at the dinner. I cringed.

After importing it onto my MacBook pro we found a font error so 180 grads later I changed all the fonts for all the grads' names. Not fun.

In PPT for Mac I love the export to movie feature. This resulted in a movie that was 6:30 in length with 5 seconds for each slide. I could have been done then, but I wasn't happy with the resulting flat, boring typical 'slideshow'.



Here's how I 'remixed' the grad slideshow. I exported the slides to pictures becuase I didn't want to start from scratch and put all the names back on toneach grad's photo again. I then uploaded all 185 pictures to Animoto (which took a while, so I walked away). Animoto was giving me a warning that they did not have music that was long enough to display all pictures, which concerned me. My workaround came from Garageband. I took a techno loop, repeated it 7 times and exported it as a 7 minute MP3. After uploading the MP3 to Animoto I waited 30 minutes for the Movie to be made and what you have is a totally remixed but way more interesting presentation that will loop all night at the dinner on Saturday. Plus. I can link embed it on our school website or give a web quality mp4 to a student to put on their grad 2009 facebook page.

http://animoto.com/play/TCN7rhzsNkKVFEaHgXxoIA

Those with the Animoto app for the ihone can also watch their own movies directly. Animoto is free to signup for. I would like to see all the mobile tweeters with iPhones start taking advantage of the ability to take photos on their iPhones, upload them to Animoto, add catchy music and tweet the link. It would be a fun and entertaining way to share your pics from NECC for each day!





Next time you have a stagnant, boring PPT that is looping over and over, consider spicing it up with Animoto!



-- Blogged from my rockin' iPod touch