CEDO 530 Week 5: Pecha Kucha

I spent too much time this week working on my Pecha Kucha, a 20 slide presentation - 20 seconds each. My presentation is a primer for newbies to 2D graphics, informing them about things they will need to learn about in order to create the kind of presentation that this displays. Actually, this presentation is really about itself.

Planning & Process: Before this week I had spent some time looking for a good online story boarding app but didn't come up with anything satisfactory. The static table based template we used was cumbersome because it would have taken a lot of work to rearrange the slides, cell text by cell text. Barring finding a good app, I think next time I'll just use a presentation program itself and create a storyboard template. Then I'll be able to just rearrange the sides if/when the need arises as it did in the one that I did.

I created each slide using Inkscape and Gimp graphics editors with either original graphics and photos or found images. I set up a template for layout, fonts, colors and other elements. I learned a lot about how to go about creating a nice uniform presentation style and so from now on the process will be much easier.

Linear Video Editing: I did my very first ever video production using WeVideo. The program itself worked out fine except I'm not happy with how it's almost impossible to get all the tracks in a scene to synchronize exactly at the start and end times. I didn't use any video footage but used all custom graphics and text. I started out animating (fade in & out) elements of each slide to synchronize with the voice over. This was a tedious task because I had to save each element of the slide individually as well as position it on the timeline. I only did this for the first 4 slides. I had to do the rest with just the static slide for the rest because of time constraints. I now know the amount of work it is to create professional quality multi-media (though mine is still nowhere near professional quality yet). I haven't looked yet but my next app to look for is a an online video editing program that can cut and splice.

Graphics: I love working with graphics. Period. And my hope is that this presentation will inspire others to take the plunge and try doing some.

Voice Over: Writing the script for the voice over wasn't that hard once I decided on the essential concepts to be presented. Occasionally, I changed the voice over from the draft depending on what the content of the slide actually turned out to be. I sometimes changed the content depending on what images I could find to convey my thoughts. This in turn changed what I would say. The real challenge was recording. Many slides had from 20-27 seconds of recorded text. Editing the text down to bare essentials while still conveying the necessary meaning was an interesting task.

Enjoy!