Pythonneries - Making Of 9

Hello,

Choosing transitions wisely is enough
to produce a presentation that is fairly

dynamic. It allows breaking slide rhythm
by mixing the continuity of idempotent

transitions with breaks to wake up
your audience.

But what transitions can’t do,
it’s moving around elements,

such as a cursor for instance, or
combine simultaneous different appearances

or disappearances. There, you
need animations.

Difficulty resides in not using
any type of animation.

When I see something like this, on the one
hand a fancy background but which can

be OK for a title, suitable font and
colors, I reserve my judgment.

Add this and I run away screaming: Comic Sans
that everybody hates, and a fancy

animation without any added value. What you
have here is what is called a visual oxymoron.

An oxymoron is the association of two words
that normally don’t go together,

such as “deafening silence”. A visual oxymoron

is an appearance that says the opposite of the text.
The text says “for pros”, production says “amateurish”,

and it says it louder.

If you want to give a movie-like quality
to your presentations, you’ll probably mix

transitions and animations. It’s especially
true if you want to turn your slides

to video, firstly because attention
quickly vanishes looking for too long

at a static slide, and secondly because
everything you could transmit by

gesticulating in front of your audience
will have to be rendered otherwise.

First of all, why animate? I see
three reasons:

1) make visualization, whether it’s text
or graphics, appear as you are

talking. That’s exactly what I’m
doing right now.

2) show a movement that is part of
the story. It may be simple or

complex.
3) stage sequences, and play on rhythm

by improving continuity and flow.

The first point is, I think, easy
to understand and can be achieved,

I have already talked about it in the 3rd
video of this series and I have shown it

in the previous video, simply with
transition. You can also, and it’s

really up to you, achieve it with
animations. You select one element

and choose “fade”, it will be the same as
adding it to a slide with a faded transition.

A number of animations are equivalent
to transitions, with two slight differences:

• You can fire several different animations
at the same time, when different transitions

must follow each other.

• Animation, when you wipe for instance,
will visually respond a tad faster to

your click as a wipe transition wipes the whole

slide. The farther the new element from
the origin of the wipe, the more you’ll

feel it.
I tend to use animations up to

four or five per slide, then
I combine animations and

transitions, but there is no hard-and-fast
rule. I’ll discuss the detail of combined

animations later.

A move that is part of the story is
something a little subtler.

If you are visual, the key criterion
might be the answer to the question:

“If I had no Powerpoint and would
explain this to somebody over a sheet of

paper or in front of a white board,
would I start scribbling arrows?”

If you are craving for scribbiing
arrows, it means animation. Another

way of knowing it is writing down
what you plan to say, and pay attention

to the verbs you are using. When you are
using stative verbs, such as “to be”

or “to become”, or verbs that suggest
no move, it means transition.

Dynamic verbs mean animation.

That will be far truer for a video
than for a presentation before a physical

audience, in front of which you can gesticulate.
But don’t forget a criterion such as the

size of the room, because from the back
row body language doesn’t help much,

nor the criterion of stage fright, optionally
combined with jet lag, which can make you

lose much of your gesticulatory capacities,
even if you are an Italian.

Let’s take a very simple example linked to
programming and let’s talk about assignment,

the operation of storing a value in memory.
In many programming languages

you’ll write something like this, first
a line that says that you are reserving

memory for storing an integer, or 'int', value,

and that you are naming that memory
area “ma_variable”. Saying what

you want to store indirectly says to the
computer which amount of memory it needs

to give you, and how to understand the 0s and
1s that will be stored there, because computer

memory stores nothing else than combinations
of 0s and 1s.

The second instruction isn’t an equality,
it simply means that we want to store

value 42 at this place in memory.

Presenting it that way in a live lecture
is doable, but while you are talking about

declaring the variable, at least half
your audience will be half listening

and half wondering what the second
instruction means.

Second version, with two slides and a
faded transition, you tell your story

about the variable, then about assignment.
A little better, but still not very exciting.

Third version, illustrated with this kind
of “box” in memory that the variable

represents. Reserving memory
doesn’t really suggest

a move, a transition or a simple
“fade” animation will do the trick.

However, when you switch to assignment,
I feel that something is missing. Value 42

doesn’t come from thin air, we store it
into the variable. It’s the result of

an action, a move. Therefore, in my
final version I’ll start with the faded

box for memory reservation, then in the
next slide, with a faded transition,

I’ll use animation to illustrate action.
I don’t know what you think about it,

but I find it better. Furthermore, you’ll
notice that the value really is “in”

the box, not “over” the box.
Animation requires care with

depth and planes, I’ll come back
to this topic later.

The last point I have mentioned, staging
sequences, is frankly more delicate

and often requires the skills of a
clock-maker. I have told it earlier,

a sequence is a series of slides about
the same idea, with elements that are

common to slides to give continuity. But

keeping an element from slide to slide
doesn’t necessarily mean that the element

will keep the same position from the first
to the last slide in the sequence.

I have mentioned to you, in the third
video again, what Garr Reynolds tells

about the “strength lines” at the thirds.
You may want to move elements between

strengths lines.
I’m talking about staging, it evokes

theatre, let’s illustrate staging with
a non-technical topic, the introduction

of a few characters from Commedia dell’arte.

The bad way of doing it, you must have seen it
as often as I have, is the classical ugly

Powerpoint slide with far too much text,
dumped to the screen all at once.

Boring to death, especially if the speaker
reads the slides, and sometimes paraphrases

them to feel like adding value.

A better speaker understands well
that text needs to be far lighter,

and that it’s the speaker’s role to
tell less important points that are no

longer on the slide. The slide becomes a
visual aid, not the whole presentation.

Additional improvement, animation character
by character. You lead your audience, which

will no longer read about Colombina when the speaker
will still be talking about il Capitano. Some speakers

will want to add a picture, here a raw
internet find, and we have seen it,

if the image is not suitable for full-screen
treatment the should remove its background

(I did it with Gimp, Powerpoint chokes
on the ruff).

In the previous video I told you that
in such a case it’s probably better to

use idempotent transitions, here a fade,
and to show an image for each one of

the characters.

Then comes a pedagogical question.
What do I want my audience to remember,

the name of the appearance of characters?
I’d rather say “appearance”, which is how

characters are identified, and in that case

I’ll keep from slide to slide, rather than the
names, a smaller version of the pictures

I have already displayed (obviously name and
picture aren’t mutually exclusive but it

would be too much information).

We are light years ahead of the first plain
ugly Powerpoint version I have shown to

you. Nevertheless, we remain in a “slide”
logic. We are conscious of moving from

slide to slide. I enforce continuity
by keeping on the one hand the “Commedia

dell’arte” title from slide to slide, and
on the other hand with images, but

it’s still a bit jumpy.

We can massively improve continuity
and make almost vanish slides with

animations, and I’m giving you an
example. Let’s start with Pulcinella,

then il Capitano, then Arlecchino, Pantalone,
et finally Colombina. You can prefer one

of the two preceding versions; but I’m
demonstrating here what is achievable,

with very few effects. You no
longer see slides. There were

nine in this sequence.

Not technical enough? Well, when
I explain that in a database

somebody who starts a transaction is
first going to save the current state

of updated values, then that somebody
else who 'd want to change the same

data will be blocked because the data
is locked, until the first usere

commits the transaction and unlocks data,
whenever I explain all this,

I’m more or less using the same methods as
with Arlecchino and Colombina. We’ll see

these methods in greater detail next time.