COVID is bad enough without PowerPoint too. The tonic is animated videos and here's the treatment
Explainer videos have a power and simplicity to them. It elevates a PowerPoint presentation composed of stationary slides into something more visual, includes motion, has characters, and it could possibly get engagement well beyond the static presentation. Explainer videos are versatile and can be used in sales for potential customers interested in a product or service, for explaining to partners what the business does, for training, and for customer service.
Why you should use Doodly for your videos
One platform that can be used to create PowerPoint-animated videos is Doodly. One can add pictures, videos, and audio that is either music or a narration. The platform is remarkably simple to download and to use, even for a novice. The idea behind this is that if you want to introduce a concept, as EASTWEST PR is doing with the SPEAK|pr program, it should be engaging. If it is new and simple, then it is shareable. If it is old and hard to understand, it's not shareable. It's a simple concept to keep in mind when creating content. On the website are many testimonials of people from different professions sharing how Doodly has helped them, whether it's in healthcare, in real estate, in education, and more.
Platforms like Doodly are very useful for repetitive presentation. Similar to PowerPoint, you can have as many slides as you want. What makes it different from PowerPoint, however, is that PowerPoint is always the same size, it's static, and you animate onto the page. With it, you can extend the timeline for each scene, you can control the introduction of different pieces of information over time, and you can create short scenes or long scenes that determine the pace of the presentation.There are many templates, effects, and characters available on Doodly, all of which can be animated and the idea built up over a period of two to three minutes with the introduction of different elements. It's possible to choose the sequence and the time that it takes for the elements to appear, as well as for the relationship between these different elements to change.
Once the framework, the content, the drawings, and the text are conceptualised, then it's time to add the audio. You can record your voice simultaneously with the slides as they're playing or add in a music track underneath the entire piece, which is really handy. Audio or .mp3 files can also be dragged and dropped into the slides. You can also have a third party platform like Talkia (which is owned by, Bryxen, the same company that owns Doodly and Toonly) narrate for you if you don't want to do the voiceover yourself. And because it's in a filmstrip presentation, you can see what came before and what's coming afterwards, and then you can articulate the pitch as the slides are unfolding. One problem is that when change the animation duration is changed on an element in one of the pictures, it would make that frame shorter, but it wouldn't make the audio any shorter. Fret not, it's not the end of the world. It's a very easy drag, slide, cut, and paste process to get the voiceover and the audio track to all be in sync. Like with all skills, it will take time and practice to develop and get better at this. Over time, the focus goes back to the content while the technology takes a back seat.
Affordable and easy to use, that's what Doodly is
Doodly has a Standard package that costs $39 a month and an Enterprise package that costs $69 a month. For $39, you get to create unlimited videos, the option to use these on multiple computers, customer support, 803 characters to choose from, 1,157 prop images, 84 scene templates, and 100 royalty-free music tracks. The photos can even be edited into line drawings, the colour can be changed, and they can be scaled big or small, gain proving how flexible Doodly is. With the enterprise package, it comes with 3,000 property images, 150 royalty-free tracks, and more perks.
What's great about using a platform like Doodly is that it can end up saving you money, beiring someone to do this could cost as much as ￡600. Since the software is so easy to use, it's perfectly easy to have a little storyboard or write some notes offline and then build the content online on the fly. This removes the need to outsource, brief, and pay someone else to do this work. Once the video is finished, it can be exported to an .mp4 file, and it doesn't take up too much size which is great, because when using PowerPoint or Keynote, the size of the files can often be large, but that's not an issue with Doodly. The video can then be uploaded to websites like Vimeo or Thinkific like with the SPEAK|pr Mastermind, which is a training course around how to create compelling and engaging content.
Moving images are 30 times more engaging than static images, and creating a PowerPoint where you sit there and train people is both repetitive for the trainer, but also not particularly engaging for the people that are watching. So, if you haven't heard of Doodly yet, you might find it useful for turning dull slides into into animated, eye-catching presentations. Thanks to Bryxen, you now have a suite of services that are easy to use and an inexpensive way to create content yourself and bring your ideas to life in the form of a video.
This article is based on a transcript from my Podcast SPEAK|pr, you can listen here.