Presenting to Win
How to Use Animation Effectively to Tell Your Story
In the context of business presentations (ranging from those on websites to ones given on stage at meetings or conferences), animation refers to motion added to computer graphics. This movement can involve either an entire slide or the visual elements within a slide. In animation, these elements move onto or off the screen; shift within the screen; or grow, shrink, change, or vanish. But how do you animate your presentations without overdoing it and alienating your audience with too much flash and sizzle?
How Versus Why and Wherefore
We’ve all seen varying degrees of electronic animation in business, from the sophisticated sequences that appear on websites to the equally sophisticated presentations at industry conferences and trade shows, many of them worthy of Disney or Pixar. Often, even conventional prepackaged corporate pitches have screen effects that rival the production values of the big-tent special events.
Most of these examples of animation are created by professional graphic artists and technicians using complex software, such as Adobe Director or Flash. Professional artists also use Adobe Photoshop to render objects and images in vivid, opulent detail for animation as well as for conventional presentations.
For the rest of us, the vast universe of consumers, there is Microsoft PowerPoint, which is installed on hundreds of millions of computers that churn out 30 million presentations per day.
This ubiquitous software, launched in 1987, has been growing its market share with each successive release, and now it is standard operating procedure for business presentations. How often have you been asked to send someone a copy of your PowerPoint slides? How often have you sat next to someone on an airplane clicking through his or her slide show? PowerPoint has also reached beyond business into our daily lives. Even elementary schoolchildren use it expertly.
Yet, as a presentations coach, one of the most frequent complaints my business clients make is, “I’m not a graphic artist!” As a result, they default to the Presentation-as-Document Syndrome. But by simply going beyond text to pictorial, numeric, or relational images and applying the principles of Less Is More and Minimize Eye Sweeps to those images, you can create graphics that are both interesting and effective.
Creating animation for those graphics, however, can be daunting. We’ve all been in the audiences of far too many presentations that unleash all the bells and whistles of the animation in PowerPoint with a frenetic, pyrotechnic display that challenges a Fourth of July celebration. This phenomenon is like putting a 14-year-old boy behind the wheel of a Ferrari Testarossa.
This situation reached epidemic proportions in the military. Pentagon officers were launching so many PowerPoint-powered animated tanks and whirling pie charts in their slide shows that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was driven to issue a directive demanding simplicity in Defense Department presentations.
It would seem that military personnel, as well as businesspeople...basically conservative segments of the population by nature...should be aware that flashy animation projects a negative image. And yet, business presentations that look like MTV videos are as common as car crashes in Hollywood movies...and just as irritating.
The reason that businesspeople perpetrate this graphic assault on their audience’s visual senses is because these presenters have learned the how-to of animation, but not the why and wherefore of its application. The computer sections of bookstores abound with worthy PowerPoint books. The Web, television, newspapers, and magazines abound with equally worthy courses and courseware that provide excellent instruction about how to operate and navigate the software. None of them, however, tells you why, where, and when to use animation and particularly not what effect animation should or could achieve.
Why use animation at all? As a conservative businessperson, you might think that animation is irrelevant, frivolous, or unnecessary. “I’m not up there to entertain people,” you might say. “When I’m making a presentation, people just want the facts, plain and simple. Fancy gimmicks will just take away from my message.”
You may be right. Any visual aid can indeed become a visual hindrance when it’s misused, resulting in distraction, annoyance, or confusion in your audience. So it is with animation. But any sword can cut both ways.
The word “animation” comes from the Latin root anima, which means “spirit” or “life,” just as the word “animated” describes a lively or energetic person. Animating the graphics in your presentation can add a sense of spirit and life to what might otherwise be a flat visual display.
Even more important, well-designed and appropriately applied animation can actually enhance your message. Just as you can create text, pictorial, numeric, and relational slides to express your important concepts, you can also strengthen that expression by adding animation to bring graphic objects on or off the screen meaningfully. The right animation can make your presentation more visually appealing, transforming it from the merely good to the truly captivating...and therefore persuasive.
The answers to the wherefore of animation can be found in intrinsic human perception and in cinema, the same sources that provide the fundamentals for the design of presentation graphics. The core principles of cinematography and editing are even more relevant in animation. What follows is an extrapolation of those well-known, innate, and well-established professional principles into a simple set of guidelines that you can apply to animate your PowerPoint presentations.
Perception Psychology
The operative rule for designing animation effects goes back to Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe’s Less Is More principle. Simplicity is the watchword for the graphics in any presentation, and that applies to animation as well. Moreover, whenever motion is involved, we must also keep in mind the cultural, psychological, and neurological factors that influence how people perceive and process visual cues.
Psychologist and art historian Rudolf Arnheim, in his book Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, described the tendency of the human eye to move across a visual field from left to right. This innate effect is further heightened in Western cultures. Text in Western languages (including English) is printed from left to right. These predispositions have a profound impact on how all human beings...including presentation audiences...perceive visual stimuli. Whenever our eyes move from left to right, the information we absorb feels “natural,” “normal,” “smooth,” “easy,” and “positive.” Many of the visual arts follow this same path:
• On the stage, protagonists usually move to the right (sympathetic movement), and villains move to the left (asympathetic).
• In the cinema, a pan right is positive and fluid; a pan left is negative and drags.
• In heraldry (the design of coats of arms), a crest that has a diagonal bar slanting down to the right is known as a Bar Dexter (from the Latin dexter, meaning right) and is said to represent legitimate members of a family. A crest that has a diagonal bar slanting down to the left is known as a Bar Sinister (from the Latin sinister, meaning left) and is said to represent a bastard. Although heraldic scholars debate the validity of these meanings, by looking at Figure 1, you can readily see that the Bar Dexter flows easily, whereas the Bar Sinister drags backwards.
Figure 1 Bar Dexter versus Bar Sinister.
• Even language echoes our innate preference for the right side: dexterous means skillful or capable, whereas sinister means evil or malevolent.
For these reasons, if you want your presentation audience to feel positive about your ideas, your animation should follow the natural, reflexive eye movement: left to right. Of course, if you want to send a negative message...say, about your competition...you should reverse direction and move your objects right to left. But do it deliberately; don’t send mixed signals by delivering a positive message about you or your business by making a negative move. Motion can induce a variety of other psychological perceptions. Because the greater part of any presentation is about you or your company, send positive messages; make the default direction of your animation left to right.
In addition to these innate emotional factors, your audience’s eyes are also driven by their highly light-sensitive optic nerves. When motion occurs on the presentation screen, the audience looks at the moving image involuntarily. If that movement is counter to the message you are trying to convey, you will confuse the audience for an instant. Such instants can build into a giant MEGO (Mine Eyes Glaze Over) effect at best or complete resistance to your ideas at worst. If the movement supports your message, your audience will stay with you...and be more receptive to your ideas.
Cinematic Techniques
In cinema, directors and editors use the camera and a montage of camera shots to express the emotional qualities of a story. The movement of subjects in front of the camera and the movement of the camera itself, along with the juxtaposition of the shots, can create either positive or negative feelings. In a romantic movie, when long-separated lovers finally come together in an embrace, the scene is likely to be filmed in long, smooth, flowing shots, conveying sensuality and abandon. In a cops-and-robbers drama, a car chase is usually captured in sharp angles and edited with short, rapid cuts, creating tension. In a western, when a wagon train of settlers moves across the screen, the camera slowly draws back from a close-up until the entire panorama of the prairie is visible, expressing the vast challenge of their journey. And in a suspenseful murder mystery, when the detective, searching for clues in a dark, empty house, suddenly hears a click, the camera quickly cuts to a close-up of a door handle, heightening the tension.
Presentation animation doesn’t offer the range and power of options available to a film director, but all the techniques you’ve just learned can be distilled into one a simple overarching principle: Use motion to help tell your story by expressing the action in your message; use motion to mirror or evoke the feeling you want to create in your audience. To reprise Shakespeare: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.”
Animation and the Presenter
It is important, before concluding, to touch briefly on the presenter’s narrative and body language as they relate to slide show animation. This is a skill called Graphics Synchronization. Please keep in mind that the highly sensitive optic nerves in your audience’s eyes cause them to react involuntarily to light and motion. The instant your animation starts, all their attention suddenly shifts to the screen and away from you.
Human brains have difficulty processing multiple inputs, especially if those inputs are separate sights and sounds. Your audience is so focused on the animation, they do not listen to what you are saying, nor do they see what you are doing. Moreover, anything you do or say creates extra sensory data that conflicts with the enlarged activity on the presentation screen. Therefore, whenever you introduce animation on your screen, stop talking, stop moving, and allow the animation to complete its full course of action.
“Action” is the operative word here. Action is the endgame. The action in animation is there to express your message. Your message is your call to action. The end result of all your action should be to elicit the best response from your audience. Remember Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “To every Action there is always opposed an equal Reaction.” If your animation action is disturbing, your audience will be distracted. If the dynamic action of your animation is synchronized with all the other elements of your presentation...your story, your graphic design, as well as your voice and body language...you can achieve the ultimate dynamic: persuading your audience to move from Point A to your Point B.