Hello,
Let’s start looking at animations in detail. They belong to three
categories. First category is made of entrance/exit effects who mostly are
symmetrical one of each other. I’d like to underline that in entrance/exit effects
you find two subcategories: those that make the object move, and those
that don’t, which are usually equivalent
to a transition. I say “usually” because, we have seen it in the eighth video,
vidéo, “dissolve” for instance isn’t visually exactly the same with animation
and transition. In the Commedia dell’ Arte example, I have used “Fly-In”
to introduce each one of the characters. It’s an entrance effect with a
movement, which can’t therefore be replaced by a transition.
Emphasis effects change the appearance of the object, either temporarily,
or until you advance to the next slide. Here as well, transitions can simulate
some effects, such as a font color change or
desaturation, and cannot simulate other effects, such as Grow/Shrink which I have also used with Arlecchino.
Motion, I’d like to say “by definition”, cannot be replaced by
a transition, even if some transitions that are not idempotent give a motion
feeling, but to all elements in the slide. I have used motion too
for Arlecchino: rather than shrinking him on the spot, jI have combined shrinking
with motion so as to place him next to his buddies. Finally, I had a faded
transition that allowed me to replace the image with a slightly desaturated version
of the same. The desaturation emphasis effect wasn’t resulting in what I wanted. In passing,
a rule learned from Bruce Block’s excellent book “The Visual Story”, desaturating colors is
an additional way, other than object size, to reinforce a feeling
of depth and remoteness when everything you see here
is a plane surface.
Let’s take a closer look at the various effects, and I’ll focus in this video
on entrance effects (I’ll hardly mention exit effects, talking about one is
talking about the other). As with transitions they are numerous, and as with
transitions I use only a few. I mostly use the ones that are underlined with
yellow, especially the ones underlined with bright yellow. “Appear” probably
needs no comments; we can use two successive slides with no transition instead,
but animation is sometimes more convenient. I ignore for a time checkerboard,
somewhat ancillary and that I’ll talk about later, to switch to the next bright yellow spot,
“Fly-In”. The object moves to its position following
a straight line from outside the slide, either horizontally, vertically,
or from any corner. I believe that there is a grammar of movement, and “Fly-in”
entrance is for me one of two cases: either something new and remarkable,
or the irruption of the external world into the presentation, with a cursor for instance.
There is however something to say that isn’t particular to the “Fly-in” entrance
but that affects it in a particular way. I apologize for bringing in childhood
memories to introduce that point. When I was a young boy, we were solving at school what
were called problems. In these problems there were many references to a small
city that was soon to become familiar and that was called A.
From A a road was leading to the hardly less famous village named B, distant from
a few miles. B looked like exerting a mysterious attraction over the A denizens, who were leaving
early in the morning to pedal rather tranquilly towards it. The inhabitants of B woke up with
more difficulty and were leaving later towards A but were younger and more
energetic, or the slope was more favorable, I don’t know, and obviously the question was
to find out when both cyclists were to cross. Sometimes, there were variations
and you had to find out the speed, it was never-ending fun. Anyway, what
this stamped in me was that speed was the distance travelled by
unit of time. Far later I studied physics and naively I kept believing that
what I had acquired in primary school was a universal truth. My certainties,
which had held firmly so far, were blown away when I discovered Powerpoint for which
speed is a time (as an aside, same story in LibreOffice). If you move by one millimeter,
as long as you do it in half a second for Powerpoint
it’s very fast, even if over this distance a snail would leave you behind. At times
I say to myself that there are places where education sucks. On positive note, Powerpoint
concepts are sometimes closer to mine. Alright, what is the problem with the Fly-In
entrance then? Easy to show. Let’s say that you want to introduce Il Capitano, Pulcinella
and Arlecchino in succession. If you activate “Fly-In” entrance for each of them using default
options, here is what you get. As you progress, you notice a slight slowing down,
because time remains the same, and distance to travel increasingly shorter. Obviously in
a presentation you prefer either speeding up or keeping a constant speed. Here, you get the
feeling of a circus number that would start with the finale before presenting average feats
and ending up by what anybody could do. It’s a poor way to keep the audience
enthusiastic. What to do? Either come back to classical notions of speed, and give more
time to moves that correspond to a longer displacement. Here, it looks more
normal; or, and if you watch my videos with attention you’ll see me using it
most often, use fly-in entrances from either right or left
when you use them several times on the same slide, so that travelled distances
remain very close. Notice that if you want to put some
emphasis over the last object that flies in, you can make it enter from a different direction.
Even if it moves slower than the other ones, contrast will give a
kick. Fly-in entrance is something I use only once for an object, unless a
triumphant exit from the screen justifies a reentrance. For the next reappearances,
it will be something not as loud. Let’s now take a look at “Peek-in”,
which proximity in the menu and similarity
of name, let me long believe that it was a close relative of
the previous one. In fact this entrance is far closer to the “Wipe” entrance.
Let’s take two rectangles, and let’s apply to each of them a different entrance.
Have you seen anything, apart from a slight blur on the left with the top rectangle and
on the right with the bottom one? In fact, the top rectangle slides towards the right and
the bottom one is revealed. There is a motion in one case, hence the “In”, not in the other one,
which a transition can replace. It’s far more obvious with arrows. And with arrows,
precisely, the two animations carry a slightly different idea. Let’s animate an arrow
from A then make B appear. With a “peek-in” entrance, I personally feel
a very strong link of causality. It’s “A entails B”. From A, you
cannot escape B. However, a “wipe” entrance conveys a link that is far more
tenuous, more an idea of sequence and time continuity, “A then B”.
Even if both entrances can be used, depending on the idea that you want to get across,
it will be one or the other. Sometimes, for instance to make the
image of a menu appear, both can work - all the more as one as well as the other
is a kind of poetic vision of the interface, as reality is
different. However, there are cases when there
is no option. If I add a mock hand-written annotation, both the
arrow and text want “wipe”, because that’s how writing works.
To make a floor-lamp get out of the bag, it’s necessary a “peek-in” entrance, here
followed by a motion. As I use in my presentations annotations far more
often than Mary Poppins’s bag, you’ll understand that I use “wipe” more
often than “peek-in”. “Fade”, it’s like grey or black
in your wardrobe; you can mix it with anything, without fearing any faux pas. We have
seen it already, between a “fade” entrance and a “fade” transition there is no difference
except, and that’s important, when you start animating by letter. Animating by letter,
why? I told it, a “wipe” entrance is perfect for showing a short
annotation. As soon as the text spreads over two lines, it falls apart. You can change options
and try to make t appear one letter at a time, but it doesn’t work, you have a feeling that
several letters are written at once. A faded entrance, letter by letter,
restitutes a feeling of manual handwriting. However, with a non-script font,
for instance to simulate a data field entry, I feel that a checkerboard entrance by letter
gives a better result. It’s the only case when I use the checkerboard entrance.
Last useful entrances, zoom entrances. As much as a motion, zooming is an effect
that a transition cannot apply to an object. You can use zooming for
for a magnifying effect as I deed (combining it with a motion)
when I introduced the Gimp toolbox; usually in such a case I use a
faded zoom. But if zooming in (the default option) is interesting,
zooming out, an option not available with the faded zoom in the version
of Powerpoint I’m using, brings an additional dimension: access from the outside,
but in a kind of transcendental way, not at all like the object that jumps into the visual
scope with the “fly-in” entrance. It’s a bit like annotations, the narrator getting
into the slide. It works very well with rubber stamping too, which carries
the same idea. Everything else, unless you are using a word that exactly matches the
name of an entrance effect, you can forget it. I use fancy exits more often than
fancy entrances. If I take for instance Taylor’s famous rule,
that gives the value of a continuous function close to a point as an expression
that is a function of powers of h and successive derivative functions in that point
(I hope it’s not Greek), I can say that if h is small, let’s say 0.1,
the square will be 0.01, the cube 0.001 and so forth, so I can get a rather decent
approximate value by dropping expressions where h is raised to a higher power
and replace the function by its tangent at that point. Saying “drop” obviously begs for
using the exit effect with the same name. I find using “boomerang” in what
I say far more difficult.