How to use Shockwave/Flash animations with Power Point presentations

Some people asked me how I did those funky animations in my SIGGRAPH 2000 talk. Those animations are Shockwave/Flash movies. They are more powerful than the power point tools in terms of the kind of animations you can do, and are more controllable than simple movie files. In addition, those movies can be played directly over the web (if you install the flash plugin with your web browser). An example is shown on the bottom of this page.

Here is a short tutorial about how it could be done.

Authoring

First, you need an authoring tool. I suggest Macromedia Flash, which can be downloaded from here. It is not easy to learn this tool, but once you get used to it, you can create pretty powerful animations. You will need to refer to the online documentations, as well as the tutorials associated with the software.

After you finish editing the movie, you need to export it to .swf format (Shockwave/Flash file). You can do this using the Flash authoring tool.

Add Shockwave/Flash animations to a Power Point file

After you have your .swf files, you need to add them to your power point presentation. Here are the basic steps:

Problems

There are several known problems when you use Shockwave/Flash movies with Power Point:

Examples

I used several Flash movies in my presentation for SIGGRAPH 2000 (make sure you choose "Enable Macros" after power point pops up). To animate, move the cursor around to find clickable items. I usually put forward buttons on the right/bottom half of the movie, and backward buttons on the top/left half.

Here is a web version of a Shockwave/Flash movie. Click the right texture for advancing, and the left texture for back up.


Li-Yi Wei