Top 5 memories of the 2024 Presentation Summit
The 2024 Presentation Summit conference has concluded, with separate in-person and virtual editions. This year marks the end, or as it was labelled, “The Last Hurrah” of the in-person conference, with only a virtual conference scheduled for next year.
Both events were fantastic to attend. And after some reflection, here are 5 of my favorite memories of the conference this year.
1. SUNSETS AND STARGAZING
- Enjoying a venue in California that’s directly on the Pacific Ocean with a sandy beach, palm trees, and the Channel Islands as our view was wonderful. With temperatures in the 70s made for amazing sunset gatherings each night! Having the once in 80,000 years “A3” comet on the horizon just after sunset – and being surrounded by people that figured out how to take long exposure night photos, at just the right location in the sky, so we could really see the comet – was truly cool!
2. TLC CREATIVE WAS THERE
- TLC Creative Services was happily in many places during the conference.
- We sponsored the event t-shirt swag.
- We showed up with “Hello” stickers to accompany the event shirt and many had fun with them.
- We hosted a PowerPoint Microsoft MVP podcast recording (and wine tasting).
- Lori dazzled with a session showcasing real-client work (no NDA content revealed!).
- I presented with a demo for 9 Microsoft PowerPoint add-in tools, showcasing real-world client formatting examples (ironically, 20 years ago I spoke on PowerPoint add-ins for design productivity!)
3. THEN AND NOW
- Conference Director Ric Altman insisted on a session entitled “Then and Now”. And it was, to my surprise, an overflowing room of people! The talk went great, and everyone had a lot of fun looking at the past and comparing it to the present.
4. 45-IN-45 and UNICORN FARTS
- Seemingly non-related session topics, all connected by presentation design, makes every memory of the Presentation Summit conference perfect. Nolan Haims, in a 45-minute session, delivered 45 absolutely amazing PowerPoint formatting tips! And the (in)famous Stephy Hogan took her AI session about creating presentation content to realms never imagined by a conference director (unicorn farts as an energy source)!
5. 22 YEARS
- Finally, as I reflect on my Summit attendee badge with 19 stars, each star representing a Summit I attended, I still believe I should have 21 stars! (Yes, I was technically a guest at a San Diego summit for a half day on my way to Montreal for a client meeting, and I’m still searching for proof of the other star…) Regardless, over the years I’ve enjoyed some fantastic sessions, had amazing offsite dinners with large (10+) and small groups of other presentation people, and in general having the opportunity to be around so many amazing presentation people.
TPP e209 – Live From the Presentation Summit
The 2024 Presentation Summit, held at the picturesque Zachary Dunes Resort in Central California, brought together a vibrant community of PowerPoint presentation
professionals – including 13 (of the 39) Microsoft awarded the title “MVP for Microsoft PowerPoint”. This episode captures the essence of the Presentation Summit conference and showcases the camaraderie, expertise, and innovative insights of the PowerPoint MVPs! Listen in as they discuss AI, presentation design, and many other hot-button presentation topics!
Join the conversation through your favorite podcast app, or at the episode 209 webpage that includes the shownotes, links to pro-and-tech-tips, and photos of the Presentation Summit!
A 2024 Happy Halloween – PowerPoint Animation/Movie
Jake Seelye, part of the TLC Creative Presentation Design Team and Showsite GFX Lead, created this mini Halloween themed PowerPoint movie!
Halloween is a favorite holiday for my family, so I was thrilled to be asked to create a Halloween themed animation using only PowerPoint for this year. One of my favorite memories around this time of year was when my friends and I would go to Knott’s Scary Farm and experience all the haunted houses and mazes.
Click play and turn on sound!
Haunted houses are certainly iconic for this holiday, and this was the inspiration behind this animation. First, I found a fun haunted mansion style stock art, along with some clouds in the background, to setup the main art and focal point of the animation:
PowerPoint’s amazing Morph transition was then used to zoom into the house, keeping the elements of the background as separate graphics to create a subtle “parallax effect.”
The seamless animation that morph provides worked well to give the feeling of walking up to an old creepy house on top of a hill. The screen capture above highlights how thinking “outside the slide” when setting up Morph animations is needed to create cinematic effects.
The next scene was the most complex, as there were many moving parts to create a fun cinematic visual animation. The lightning and simultaneous flashes of the environment here were created using simple PPT animations and graphic editing. The lightning bolts themselves were setup using “Wipe Down” and set to be quick, much like actual lightning. The “lit up” landscape was created by adding in a duplicate background graphic over the top of the house, with the brightness and contrast turned up quite a bit to simulate how lightning lights up the land around it.
A small but fun detail of this scene is the Jack-O-Lantern on the porch, with the “Pulse” animation on the eyes and mouth to make them appear to glow and flicker, set to repeat until the next slide/scene.
Finally, to add to the eerie atmosphere, I added some fall leaves to blow through the scene, using motion paths, and duplicating them while randomizing the timing:
This is a lot of animations and elements on one slide, all for about 8 seconds of actual animation, which really makes you appreciate the real animation artists out there who make full 2-hour animated films.
The final act of the animation features a Witch soaring into the skies above the haunted mansion and creating a “Happy Halloween” visual across the starlit background. The first part of this was achieved with morph once again, as a way to move from the mansion background to the starry sky background, in an upwards motion, and to also move the Witch across the screen as if she was flying.
Almost counterintuitive is the animation pane on this slide is empty, but the slide is full of animation (Morph transition at work).
Finally, the Happy Halloween ending was created using a motion path for the witch, and a “wipe right” animation for the letters, as if the Witch were creating the greeting with her magical broom.
And that’s it! With some time, trial and error, and creative usage of PowerPoint’s animation tools, you can actually create pretty fun movie without ever having to leave PowerPoint!
-Jake
MS Copilot as the External Presentation Reviewer
I made a quick mini-presentation video of my 2024 Presentation Summit mini-presentation that was part of the “AI Showdown”.
Troy @ TLC
AI For Presentation ShowDown
At the 2024 Presentation Summit conference I was invited to be part of a fun event, “The AI for Presentation Showdown”. The goal was 5 event presenters each had 4 minutes to display a real-world application of an AI tool of their choice used for presentation – which could mean presentation design, presentation content creation, etc.
My AI tool was using Microsoft CoPilot, from within PowerPoint, to provide a 3rd party/unbiased review of the presentation and provide a summary of the content, based on the slide content. The prompt was simply “Summarize this presentation”. The idea is to review with the presenter and see if the external summary of the presentation message aligned with the message they planned.
I think this is a great use of AI as it provides an unbiased review and summary, which is a great conversation starter.
(note: I intended to have a video of my portion of this talk, but sadly no video was captured…)
Troy @ TLC
Fun with Friends at the 2024 Presentation Summit
The 2024 Presentation Summit with ~200 presentation designers, trainers and speakers is a great place to be this week! In addition to being directly on the California beach with amazing sunsets, we heard from amazing presenters from Guy Kawasaki to Sally Koering Zimney. We have been with many, many amazing presentation designers, we’ve being geeky and gathering around computer screens to see the presentation work of others, we’ve enjoyed group dinners, and even star gazed to try and get long exposure photos of the Comet A3 just after sunset.
Troy & Lori @ TLC