Power Point - Can you do this?

Mar 23, 2011

Hello,

I am trying to use Power Point to animate a scenario.

I have an office setting and a guy sitting on an office chair. What I want to do is to have the guy slide from out of his cubicle, then slide back in.

Where I am having the problem is getting that graphic to 'go behind' to other one, giving the illusion that he is sliding in/out of his cubicle.

At first (and I thought I was being quite clever here) I thought I could create a rectangle and bring it to the front, then make it transparent. I thought I was a genius! When I tried it.....guess what.....it was transparent. You could see right through the bloody thing. OK...time to re-group now and ask for help. I have spent over an hour trying different things.

Do you have any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks!

-Dave

I have attached a pic so you can see what I am explaining.

office+chair.jpg

13 Replies

Jeanette Brooks

13 years ago03/23/11 at 5:23 am (UTC)

Hi Dave - you could try creating a duplicate of the image, place it on top of the original, and crop it so that only the cubicle wall is showing. Then put your guy in between the two images so that the cropped image is concealing him till he slides out from behind it. I'm attaching a sample so you can see what I mean. The pptx is for PPT 2007/2010, The ppt is in case you have PPT 2003.

dave-motionpaths.zip

Dave Newgass
Author

13 years ago03/23/11 at 5:32 am (UTC)

Jeanette Brooks said:

Hi Dave - you could try creating a duplicate of the image, place it on top of the original, and crop it so that only the cubicle wall is showing. Then put your guy in between the two images so that the cropped image is concealing him till he slides out from behind it. I'm attaching a sample so you can see what I mean. The pptx is for PPT 2007/2010, The ppt is in case you have PPT 2003

Brilliant!

I thought I was a clever clogs......but you got it nailed!

Thanks for the help Jeanette!

Cheers,

Dave

Thomas Veach

13 years ago03/29/11 at 6:01 am (UTC)

Okay, I ain't been round much lately and what Jeanette provided looks great.

Here's a second option I have used.

Make a copy of the empty office picture.

Put a green shape with no outline, large enough to cover the guy in the hall way.

Select the picture and shape.

Cut them

Paste back as a PNG

Recolor the shape to be transparent.

Make original picture the backmost picture.

Make the guy in the chair the next layer

Move the picture with the hole in it onto the top layer on top of the original picture.

Add a motion path to pull the guy in the chair into the hole and back out.

James Brown

13 years ago03/29/11 at 7:23 am (UTC)

Jeanette, you hit it right on the head. You came up with the same layered solution I was thinking of.

Poornima Ramachandran

13 years ago04/05/11 at 9:11 pm (UTC)

Ooops... Very sorry I'm really late...

Solution from Jeanette is great. Just to add to to it - In the example she had provided, you could make a cubicle wall with a simple neat crop. But in instances like Dave's `Office Chair' example, its not possible to take a duplicate of the wall by a neat crop.

I don't have Photoshop, so I always use Power Point to cut out my images. You can use the freeform tool to stencil the image.

Luckily, I had downloaded the same images from elearningArt.

So I have attached the finished version of the same image, and some directions on how I did it in Power Point.Hope this helps...

Though I am late, I hope the attached file would serve useful to someone else.

man+in+cubicle.pptx

Jeanette Brooks

13 years ago04/06/11 at 5:46 am (UTC)

Thank you Poornima - that is an awsesome tip! For folks who might want to see a visual walk-through of the process that Poornima suggests, Montse did a nice screencast with a similar example and you can watch it here: https://player.vimeo.com/video/204870467

Incidentally, for anyone who'd like to download a four-slide interaction that Tom created based on the cubicle guy posted above, check out this download.