It’s summer, and let’s be honest, during a blistering California summer, looking at some chilly mountains can be good therapy! 

Back in July 2020, we created a post about this dynamic slide, which utilized creative layering of static images and an embedded video. One thing to note is that we used PowerPoint’s native background removal tool – which has remained unchanged for years. Overall, this is a great effect and can be repurposed to use in a number of presentations!

The Design Process

  • First, we started with a static image: a mountain range with a blue sky. 

  • With some effort, we were able to use PowerPoint’s Remove Background tool to remove the blue sky so the mountain stood alone. 

  • Then, we found a great video of moving clouds. Of course, our slide shows a snow-covered mountain and the video we found shows a grass covered field. However, because the static image of the mountain range will be in front of the video, effectively blocking the grass, it works great for our slide! (But also, the video could be cropped to remove the lower grass from being part of the playback). 

  • Layered on the slide, everything blends together great! The moving clouds in the video add subtle motion to the scene, while the grassy portion of the video is not seen.

  • Finally, we layered some stylized PowerPoint text on top of the mountains to complete the slide design. 

The result? A visually compelling slide with a natural, fluid feel—made entirely in PowerPoint. But what’s wrong with this picture? Exactly…it’s a low-res image and not a video! Let’s blame it on Covid, but we weren’t able to find some of the original files from this post, so let’s recreate this layered effect again today. 

How We Recreated a Similar Cloudy Mountaintop Today 

We found the mountain scene jpg, but since PowerPoint’s background removal tool hasn’t changed and we don’t want to spend that much time again, we’re going to take the image into Photoshop and use Photoshop’s generative tools to remove the sky quickly and create a .png image. 

Using a different but similar video of moving clouds (this time with no grass in the foreground) we layered the cloud video and mountain graphic in PowerPoint and added stylized text. Now we’re back to where we started! 

This time, however, we can show you the final results in video form. Overall, this is a great effect and can be repurposed in a variety of ways to use in a number of presentations! 

Feeling a little relief from the heat? We hope you can use this layering technique sometime by following the same steps!   

– Troy @ TLC