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