My chosen software was PowerPoint and I decided to work on the kinetic text technique.
I used this tutorial and found this extremely helpful because it quickly taught me the basics and allowed me to experiment only using the simple techniques in that 6-minute video. However, this video was using the 2013 version of PowerPoint while I only had the 2010 version but this didn't create too big a problem except for the fact that I didn't have the eyedropper tool (copying and applying colours can still be done using colour codes and RGB values but this is more complicated) because I could still easily find everything to complete my task.
In addition, I also used this tutorial. This wasn't as easy to follow as the previous one because the video was pretty quick and didn't include a person voice-over-ing, explaining everything one by one. In this video, I learnt about finding the hidden additional entrance, emphasis and exit animations. Moreover, I found out about creating a nice shadow effect under the text.
Another tutorial I watched was this one. I didn't like this tutorial much because everything was far too quick and wasn't at a good pace which I could follow up with. On the other hand, I still learnt about how you could duplicate the slide to add additional animations and more advanced animation techniques.
I decided to do my first trial video infographic on a statistic on hunger. I chose this statistic:
1/7 of Hong Kong's 7 million population is in poverty as of 2014
This was my end-product-
What I have done:
1. I wrote my fact in a textbox in a basic Calibri font
2. I had to think about the colour scheme of this little animation because one, appearance and visuals are very important in a way that it can lead the eye to the important things; two, as we have learnt in Year 8, colour can convey a message and an emotion as well- blue can mean sad, yellow can mean happy etc. I decided to go with a good dark yellow-orange colour with white text as I thought it contrasted well and could give out a bright aura.
3. I formatted my text: changing the size and font. This again needed some thought because I had to decide what words were the important ones and had to be larger. Similarly, font is important too because it again can evoke emotion, character and meaning. Think about it, if the word "poverty" was tiny and the font was a handwritten one it would evoke a feeling that it is unsignificant, faint and weak. To evoke a strong and significant character, a much bolder font would be suitable. One could even say that each font has its own personality!
4. I started working on the animations. This was mainly the hard task because it was extremely hard to decide which animation I should do and which is the best for the effect I was going for. Of course, I had a look at the some examples on the internet for some ideas on what animations I should go for and how I should format them so that it looks interesting and attract people's attention. This included a lot of trial and error, playing animations then evaluating whether or not it was good or not, changing font size from time to time etc. etc.
5. Finally exporting my PowerPoint into a video as shown above
After actually doing this animation work, I realized that it is definitely not as simple as the basic picture animations you would do to make a presentation more interesting as I thought it might be. Furthermore, I understood that there are many skills in this as I watched in the third tutorial. I also realized that PowerPoint is actually a way more powerful tool than I used to think- it can do pretty much the same thing as After Effects (a program for motion graphics and visual effects) but on a much more junior level.
