The best presentations are always great stories. Stories that invoke clashing images that open your mind. But, the “State of the Business Presentation” today is pretty lame. Boring. Bullet-pointed PowerPoint ad nauseum. How to get adventurous when giving presentations? How to help banish the “boring” from business presentations? To use images and imagery to bolster your story?
Animoto
Animoto is a web application that allows you to automatically generate professionally produced videos using pictures, music and text. Think movie trailer.
The creative ways to use Animoto are limited only by your mind. Below are examples of some different ways you can use Animoto to communicate with your customers, prospects, friends, or anyone else. Animoto videos can be downloaded, embedded in websites, blogs, emailed, burned to DVD’s, and on and on and on.
First – An Inconvenient Genius
This is an intro video to the story “An Inconvenient Genius,” a collage of photos from the life of Nikola Tesla.
Animoto videos upload easily to other video-sharing sites. But what does it look like? Clear or crappy? You decide. Below is the same file uploaded to Veoh.com. I prefer Veoh over YouTube because of the clarity, quality and size of the display.
Here is the same video on:
Animoto ports over professionally with clarity and no degradation of image quality.
“About the Author”
This is an Animoto video from a story I did with Steven Pressfield, the bestselling author of “The Legend of Bagger Vance”, “Tides of War”, “The War of Art”, and many others. Most “about” sections are pretty lame and boring. Whether they’re “about the author” or “about the company.” This one is different. But then again … Steven Pressfield is different. He had plenty of images for me to use.
“Life … Pass It On.”
This was for a charity to help register people for organ donations. It’s particularly poignant. The young man featured in the video, Brandon, was a child of a woman I work with, Vickie Jackson. It was hard to do. Hard to look at now even.
One interesting note on this video. Brandon’s grandmother wanted to see this video but didn’t have a computer. You can create DVD file formats on Animoto. Did that and burned a DVD of this video for his grandmother. The quality and clarity was impeccably professional.
Artists – Photographers?
This is an Animotorized version of the Hal Sherman Blue Jacket collection. Hal’s a friend of mine and was game to experiment with Animoto ( that means he has guts to try new things). Interesting backstory about Hal. He was a banker, but his passion was always painting. So he quit banking. Started painting. Now his artwork can be seen in museums around the United States – including the Smithsonian. This is Animoto video of his artwork, includes paintings of Blue Jacket, Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone, Cornstalk, Moluntha, Simon Girty, William Henry Harrison, Half King, William Crawford, Captain John Perry and others. I screen-capped the images from museums on-line and a few he sent me.
Networking, Collaborative Groups, Associations
Belong to a group, association, or just have a bunch of friends you’d like to memorialize on video? Easy to do with Animoto. Skip Press, a prolific author and well-known screenwriting coach, has an online writing forum with a lot of passionate and dedicated members. We took mixed their photos with Animoto and threw in a few cartoons. It’s a good way to let people know who you are, what you do, and if you have a sense of humor. Cheesy cartoons are courtesy of … hold your breath – me.
Speaking of Cartoons
This is an Animoto video of cartoons taken from my “Shoot the Donkey” column.
How About Sales Presentations?
What better way then to start a sales presentation – or presentation of any kind for that matter – with some bling and punch? A rocking video clip? The Animoto clip below is a satirical look at the current state of the “Sales Presentation”… from the victim’s view. The victim is that unfortunate person that has to watch the standard PowerPoint Gluteus Maximux Vomitus Eruptus because it’s their job. And yes, I know there are spelling mistakes in some of the slides and cartoons. I wanted it to be realistic.
This last one is a collage of clashing images and concepts used for an article titled, “End with a Question … Questions with an End.”
So, there you go – Animoto.
The creative possibilities are limited … only by your mind.
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