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During his long and distinguished career, the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa pioneered many innovative cinematic techniques that are applicable to today’s presentation graphics. One is Mr. Kurosawa’s creative use of the Wipe, a filmic transition between scenes in which a new image slides across an existing image and replaces it—like a curtain being drawn across the screen.
In today’s fast-cut action films, the Wipe has fallen out of favor, but the effect is very useful in presentations where fast cuts can be jarring to an audience. More about speeds in a moment, but first let’s look at how Mr. Kurosawa used Wipes in his 1952 film, Ikiru.
Ikiru, which means “to live” in Japanese, is a story about a man dying of terminal cancer, and was inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novel by Leo Tolstoy. Two current films, Biutiful and Beginners, deal with the same personal subject, but Mr. Kurosawa provided an extra dimension to his film by adding social commentary—and expressing his point of view with the Wipe effect.
The leading character in Ikiru is a career civil servant in post-World War II Japan where stultifying bureaucracy was weighing heavily on a Japanese society trying to recover and stabilize. To illustrate that situation, a group of mothers shows up at a government office to lodge a complaint about a sewage pond in their neighborhood, but the bureaucrats duck their responsibility by sending the mothers to another office, and then to another, and another, giving them the runaround.
Mr. Kurosawa depicts the runaround in a montage of 16 very short scenes, transitioning from one office to another with the Wipe effect. The first nine Wipes alternate left and right, but the last seven all move to the left. In an earlier post you read that, because audiences “read from left to right, you should design, animate, and display your presentation graphics so that—depending on the message you want to convey—your graphics follow or fight that predisposition. Movement to the right creates positive perceptions, movement to the left negative.”
In Ikiru, the crescendo of leftward moves builds to create a negative perception of the bureaucrats. Film historian Stephen Prince, who provided the commentary track on the Criterion Collection version of the film, called the montage “an assembly which is basically a Rogues’ Gallery of scoundrels.”
The lesson for presenters is; if you want to send a negative message, for instance, to discuss your competition, use the Wipe Left transition in PowerPoint. But if you want to create a positive perception of your own company, use the Wipe Right.
Now for a note about speed: In all the versions of PowerPoint prior to 2010, the Wipe Right transition was done with a hard edge and at a fast speed, creating that curtain-across-the-screen effect. In the 2010 version, the default for the Wipe Right transition is with a soft edge at a slower speed, creating the effect of a dissolve, and slowing down the transition. I am not recommending that you revert to the machine gun cutting that most of our movies use today; instead, use the Wipe Right as your preferred transition, but change the speed from the default of one second to a quarter of a second.
Give your audiences positive perceptions, not a Rogues’ Gallery of scoundrels.
Jerry Weissman is among the world’s foremost corporate presentations coaches. His private client list reads like a who’s who of the world’s best companies, including the top brass at Yahoo!, Intel, Intuit, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Netflix and many others.
Jerry founded Power Presentations, Ltd. in 1988. One of his earliest efforts was the Cisco Systems IPO road show. Following its successful launch, Don Valentine, of Sequoia Capital, and then chairman of Cisco’s Board of Directors, attributed “at least two to three dollars” of the offering price to Jerry’s coaching. That endorsement led to more than 500 other IPO road show presentations that have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in the stock market.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
Filed Under:
Guest Posts
Tagged as: Guest Post, Jerry Weissman, Opinion, PowerPoint, Transitions
Picture fills can look great and distracting at the same time — it all depends upon the type of picture you use for the fill. Remember using a detailed or crowded picture as a fill for a small shape will get you no awards for slide design! Any shape on your slide in PowerPoint 2011 can be provided with a picture fill in the same way that you learned to add or change solid fills or gradient fills.
Learn how to add a picture fill to selected shapes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Fills, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
Unlike most other views in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, the Reading view is new for this version. Not exactly new because it is quite similar to the Browsed by an individual (window) option that PowerPoint 2003 and 2007 provided within the Set Up Show dialog — but yes, it has some extra features now, and can be accessed right from the Slide Show tab of the Ribbon. In many ways, Reading view is similar to Slide Show view because in both views, the slide is shown in full screen. However, in Reading view you also see the PowerPoint title bar and the status bar at the top and bottom of the interface respectively.
Learn about Reading view in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Tutorials
PowerPoint 2011 essentially provides five fill options: solid, picture, gradient, texture and slide background fill. Of course there’s a sixth option called “No fill”. We have already explored the solid fill option. In this tutorial, you’ll learn about working with gradient fills. Gradient fills are typically blended fills between two or more colors that graduate from one color to another.
Learn how to add gradient fills to selected shapes in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2011
Tagged as: Fills, Office for Mac, PowerPoint 2011, Tutorials
PowerPoint has several views that let you view your slides, or edit them. Speaker notes associated with slides are typically visible in both Normal and Presenter views — in addition, the Notes Page view also enables you to view your speaker notes in a page view. Each slide created contains its own note page. You can print these pages out to use as a reference while delivering the presentation. The notes do not show on the screen during Slide Show view.
Learn about Notes Page view in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2010, Tutorials
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