Creating Your Own Animated GIFs Final Part

Cleanup on Aisle Four

Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4

These blog posts have only scratched the surface of PowerPoint’s graphics potential. However, we’re mostly talking hacks here, because I’m convinced that PowerPoint was originally created as an instrument of torment for college students and conference attendees. You haven’t lived until you’ve spent an hour watching the backside of some guy while he reads his slides to you. The thing does have its limitations and a well-deserved bad reputation. In this post I’ll discuss some of those limitations (and additional virtues) before tackling a few final hacks.

Page Size

I know I said earlier to use a nice big canvas when you started a project because it helped you maintain image resolution while you copy, paste, crop, stretch and generally pummel the hell out of your image. However, I’ll walk that back a bit: 1) It’s better to use a smaller page if you really need to control file size or if your original image just won’t stand being stretched to fit a large canvas. 2) If you need your final product to be square, start with a square page; if you need a particular aspect ratio, start with that ratio. 3) If you must resize a project that you’ve already put a lot of work into, I’ve found that choosing “Ensure Fit” when you do will maintain most of the spatial relationships you developed in the original layout.

File size

Page size is a key element of file size. Some venues (Goodreads for one) will only accept graphics and GIFs of a certain maximum file size. It can be frustrating to put a lot of effort into a nice animation and then find you can’t even use it. PowerPoint does not have good file size control and your project can get into the megs very quickly. Multiple layers can be the worst offenders; be sure you Cut/Paste-as-picture and then use the “Compress Image” tool on your final product.  And breaking news: Giphy.com now lets you download your GIF in four descending file sizes including “small.”

Simplicity

For many application, a subtle animation can be more effective than one “filled with sound and fury.” Of my examples, the “Dark Romance” cover is more attractive than the circling bat in “Scary Story.” These examples were developed to illustrate a technique, not a style. While “Dark Romance” would work well on a venue such as Facebook, a flashier style may be more effective on Twitter where it has to compete with other sparkly images. PowerPoint has many animations that serve more to distract than to enhance. Keeping your final product simple will also help reduce file size.

Transparency and Soft Edges

Any transparency including glow, drop-shadows, and soft edges is mostly a product of the PowerPoint software itself and doesn’t always transfer to an external image format. Therefore, be sure to Cut/Paste-as-picture anything that includes transparency, before exporting it. This especially applies to still images printed to an Acrobat PDF file.

Grouping and Ungrouping

Selecting a set of objects and setting them as a group is a convenient way of handling multiple related images. You can move them, re-size them, or rotate them without changing their relative orientation. However, you can’t animate objects individually within a group, and when you animate a group of objects, you will lose the animation if you ungroup them.

Shape Fill

PowerPoint offers a selection of textures and patterns to fill a vector shape. These are handy for a quick background or to add a little extra interest to a drawing. However, the patterns don’t scale. Therefore, if your image size is too big, the pattern will only show up as tiny grains. One solution is to draw your shape at a smaller size, add the texture, then Cut/Paste-as-picture and re-scale it to fit. Another solution is to create a set of your own textures saved as JPGs and use them for custom fills.

A Few Virtues…

Text

Text is where PowerPoint rocks. You have complete control over size, shape, font, and special text features such as shadow, fill, and 3d. If Microsoft didn’t provide the font you need, there’s always Fontsquirrel.com and a bunch of other sources of free fonts.

Scratch Pages

PowerPoint was designed to use multiple “Slides.” This harkens back to the time when physical slide transparencies were used in presentations. For a graphics project or an animation, these additional pages are most useful for “scratch” pads to develop graphics components. These scratch pages can mess up your GIF, so save first, then delete the extra pages, save-as MPG4, then close without saving.

…And now the bat:

Two techniques are needed to make a bat or a bird or a moving character like my janitor up there. First is the flapping motion itself, and second is movement on the screen.

PowerPoint has two rotating motions that are useful, “Spin” and “Wiggle.” You’ll find these under Animations/Emphasis. For the bat wing, I used “Spin” and selected “Quarter Turn” from the “Effect Options” menu. One problem, the wing you’ve drawn wants to rotate about its mid-point. To solve this create a line with the center at your desired point of rotation and group it with your bat-wing. Now rotate the entire group.

 I’ve illustrated it here with a box to illustrate the idea, even though only a line is needed. The trick is, when it rotates the way you want, select the line and set the color to “No line.” It’s still there… just invisible. Now your batwing will flap instead of rotating. 

To make the animation work, you have to start with the wing at 45 degrees, rotate it down, then rotate it back up. Then repeat, and repeat, and repeat… Using the selection pane makes this process a little easier. It’s still tedious, but whoa, look at the cool results.

The second part is simpler. Once you have the wings and the bat’s body all together (say three shapes), then select all three and choose “Custom Path” in the “Animations/Motion Paths” menu (do not, I beg you, do not group the three objects). This way, you apply the same path to all three shapes. The wings flap, the bat flitters around, woo hoo!!

In this final part, we’ve clarified a few items on using PowerPoint to develop animated scenes and make them into GIFs for use in social media and other web applications. We’ve also explored how to use “Spin” to make an object turn about any center we choose, even a center that is off-screen, and how to move a group of moving objects using the “Custom Path” animation.

Clone Stomping

PowerPoint Hacks  Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   

I am hoping that readers of this blog may forgive the wretched colors and silly titles in my example book covers. You may even suspect that I cheated by using some other software, such as Photoshop or GIMP to prepare the images. 

Not so, dear reader. However, I did manipulate the background photos with PowerPoint. In this post I will show two PowerPoint techniques for image editing that “work around” some of its graphic design shortfalls. I am assuming you are familiar with basic PowerPoint techniques, or have read through Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.

Crop

First off, PowerPoint lacks the much beloved “Clone Stamp” tool of Photoshop. I’ll walk through a simple technique that can replace some of the Clone Stamp functionality (some). The tools that I use are “Crop” and “Soft Edges.” I started with a public domain drawing of the ruined Abbey of Jumièges in France.

I could have simply resized it and put the title over the image, but what it really needed was a little more sky to hold my title and highlight the ruins (and demonstrate the animation). For this I used “Crop.” I did a copy/paste to generate a duplicate image (turned off the original to get it out of the way). Then I cropped the upper left hand corner and did a “Cut/Paste-as-picture” to make a new image. For the most control of your picture, you can right-click and pick “Format Object” at the bottom of the menu.

This will give you a formatting pane with multiple options. To do an ersatz “Clone Stamp,” pick the pentagon icon and select “Soft Edges.” I used a 10 point soft edge, but you can move the slider to set the edge size as needed.

Now make several copies, turn your cover image back on and arrange your “patches” to cover or fill whatever you need to change. Note that I inverted the middle image to avoid a repetitive pattern.

Also note that I’ve allowed the soft edges to spill out beyond my drawing limits. We’ll fix that by selecting all (Ctl+A) and “Cut/Paste-as-picture” to merge everything into a single image, then cropping it back to the original page size. Voilà, a “Clone Stamp” clone.

Freeform

Here's a neat trick that PowerPoint does well and Photoshop doesn’t do at all. Up until now, we’ve been using the bitmapped picture editing tools. Photoshop is king of the bitmap editors. With Photoshop or GIMP you can tweak an image right down to the pixel level. However Photoshop does not have vector graphic capabilities. PowerPoint does.

In this topic we’ll explore the “Freeform” shape and the “Edit Points” tool. Hit your “Home” tab and go to the “Drawing” section. Click the barred triangle next to the shapes to show all of the ready-made drawing shapes. Under “Lines,” you’ll find an irregular outline labeled “Freeform.” Selecting this shape allows you to draw a polygon as a series of points. Clicking around on your page will create vertices with segments between them. Click on the initial point to close the shape, or hit “Esc” to stop drawing and just keep the wiggly line.

PowerPoint assigns a default line color and weight to your shape, as well as a default fill color if you’ve closed the polygon. Right-click the shape, and you’ll get the menu to change the “Style,” “Fill,” and “Outline.” Since we’re going to use “Freeform” to do a precision trim on our picture, set “Outline” to “No Outline.” The default color is fine.

There’s an important distinction here between “Picture” and “Shape.” In PowerPoint, a “Picture” is a bitmap, but a “Shape” is a vector graphic. Right click your Freeform shape and select “Edit Points.” Here’s your real gem in PowerPoint. This tool give you control of not only the point locations (you can drag them around to change the shape), but also the segments themselves. In “Edit Points” right click a segment and you can add points, open the shape, or change segment to a “Curved Segment.” Select a point and two little white “handles” appear. Moving these around will curve the adjacent segment… the beauty of a vector graphic; its form is totally plastic.

Okay, PowerPoint has a few quirks. One of them is that right-clicking a segment will sometimes add a point, and sometimes not. Sometimes a segment will decide to curve; easy to fix, but frustrating at times. It’s all worth it because the combination of bitmap and vector graphics in a single app allows you to easily edit your pictures.

To do a precision cut on your drawing, use a freeform to select the areas you want to remove. For layering it doesn’t have to be perfect. Once you’ve drawn the shape and fitted it to your graphic, be sure to select “No Line,” then “Cut/Paste-as-picture” with both the graphic and the shape. This will merge them into a single bitmapped picture that you can use “Remove Background” to trim.

With your layer trimmed this way, it makes it appear that the bat flies out of the door and then behind the tower. You can use the same hack to either make holes in a graphic, or to cut out specific pieces of a graphic for animations or other compositions.

In this post, we explored a quick-and-dirty “Clone Stamp” clone for making simple modifications to your graphic, and we walked through a neat way to make precision “Remove Background” cuts using vector graphics and the “Edit Points” tool. These two hacks make graphics editing fast and simple in PowerPoint...

What, what about the bat? We’ll tackle the bat animation in the next post; we’ll also do a little housekeeping on some of the details. Stand by.

Creating Graphic Layers

PowerPoint Hacks Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4

This post will show you how to use the “Remove Background” tool in PowerPoint to create layers from your JPG image. By using layers, you can create a more complex animated GIF of your book cover, wine label, or other marketing graphic. In Part 1, we went through some of the basic PowerPoint tools to create a simple animated GIF and presented some useful PowerPoint techniques for editing graphic images. If you are not a PowerPoint power user, you should first review that earlier post.

By the time most authors see their book cover, it’s a single graphic file, often either a JPG or PDF. The challenge is to deconstruct it into pieces that can be used in an animated GIF. For this example, I’ll start with the cover image shown here:

Detailed Description

Bear with me while I walk through a detailed example of using the "Remove Background" tool. Open a PowerPoint file and resize the pages as before. Insert “Pictures,” select your cover and drag it to about the right size. As before “Cut” your image and “Paste” it as “Picture.” Then do the final resize to fit your page. “Cut/Paste as picture” will remove any vestigial JPG or PDF constraints on editing. 

Make a duplicate slide (right-click thumbnail on the left and hit “Duplicate Slide”) and open your view pane. Select your picture, hit “Picture Tools” and click “Remove Background.” The purple areas will be removed (made transparent). 

The box marked with eight white handles acts as a cropping tool. It also changes the initial selection. You can drag the handles around to get different effects. If you use the image I provided, you should get something like these:

The second view is the one I wanted so I hit “Keep Changes” to get the last image. You can go back to “Remove Background” at this point and make additional changes. If you are satisfied, do a “Cut/Paste as picture” over your original image and adjust the alignment so that they appear as one. Voilà, your cover now consists of two layers.

Now to make your image do something interesting. I used “Remove Background” on this skull picture making it appear to float. You can see that the first pass is okay, but it could be better:

Use the “Mark Areas to Remove” pencils to draw lines through the parts of the figure you want to modify. Notice that this whole process is iterative and not terribly exact. In a later post I’ll show some tricks to trim out a more precise area. For this example, I also used the “Artistic Effects” Blur tool to make the skull image look more spectral.

“Cut/Paste as picture” into your cover image and resize to suit. Using the “Selection Pane” position it between your background and your first layer. You can also use the "Selection Pane" to turn off the background and layer pics when you create your animation.

Animation

Now with the animation. For this one I used a “Path” animation for entry and a “Fade” for exit. Select your object, hit “Animations” and “Add Animation.” Scroll to the bottom, and select “Motion Paths/Lines.” Set it to start “With Previous” and give it a long duration.

Same with the exit. This example uses “Fade” and staggers the exit with the motion to make the overall effect smooth. Don’t forget to delay the start of your motion about 0.5 seconds and make sure your exit is also set to start “With Previous.” Now, Save, then delete all of the slides except your animation slide and “Save As: Video MPEG-4” as you did earlier. Do a final check of timing and appearance. Good? Then go to Giphy.com and you've got the rest already.

In walking through this example, you’ve seen two useful PowerPoint techniques, the “Remove Background” tool, and the “Path” animation. You likely (hopefully) experimented with some of the other animation options. You’ll note that the critical factor is timing. If you find an effect that ‘almost-but-not-quite’ does what you want, try a small variation on the timing. Also, if you need a compact GIF with a small file size, just start with a smaller slide. You lose resolution, but on the small-screen, who cares. I’ve had success with a 4”X6” format for Twitter posts. You’ve probably also considered more complex GIFs and native MPG4 videos. By using slide transitions, you can create a video using multiple scenes all within PowerPoint. Try it.

In my next post, I’ll show how to use the “Freeform” drawing tool to create useful shapes and masks for precision trimming with “Remove Background.” I’ll also show how the use “Soft Edges” to merge two graphics.

Creating Your Own Animated GIF

PowerPoint Hacks  Part 1   Part 2   Part 3   Part 4

Getting your graphic to stand out is harder now than ever. This blog post will show you how to spiff up your cover image, wine label, or twitter post using a few easy tools. Okay, I’ll admit I’m not a graphic designer and I have the color sense of a basset hound. That said, I’ve found a few easy hacks to turn your static image into an eye-catching animated gif. Our secret weapon is the much-maligned MS PowerPoint. Okay, save the brick-bats and vegetables until you try it. PowerPoint has some surprising graphics capabilities.... if you know how to use them. To start with, let’s walk through creating this simple gif animation:

The Highlights

If you are already a Master PowerPointer, here’s the short version:

• Import your cover, illustrations, titles... whatnot into PowerPoint. 
• Use the animation tab to create one animated slide. Fuss with the composition and animation timing until you like it (hint, keep things simple). When you're happy with your creation, be sure to save.
• Okay, here's the trick that not too many know: Do a "Save-As," select File Type: MPG4 and save your PowerPoint animation as a video.
• Now upload your masterpiece to Giphy.com and let it create a cool animated gif for use with twitter, blogs, emails and general promotion as you see fit.

Step-by-Step Instructions

For this more detailed explanation, I am assuming that you seldom (never?) use PowerPoint, so forgive the step-by-step minutia. Additionally, I am using the Microsoft Office 365 version of PowerPoint for this example. Earlier versions will work, but you’ll have to hunt out the equivalent menu commands.

Open a new MS PowerPoint document and delete any text boxes or other extraneous elements from the slide. Then go to menu item “Design,” select “Slide Size/Custom Slide Size,” and set your project to 11 inches wide by 17 inches high, portrait orientation. When it asks, select “Maximize.” Since PowerPoint resolution is fixed at 150 pixels per inch, using a big canvas like this makes your final graphic nice and sharp. However, you can set the slide to whatever size best suits your image.

 Now import your book cover into the slide. Generally, you will get the best resolution if you use the “Insert” tab, select “Pictures,” and choose a cover graphics file from your computer. Select the biggest file you have; you’ll resize it in the next step. You can also do a screen-grab and paste it directly into your slide. Now, right-click the picture and select “Format Picture” at the bottom of the menu. This will bring up a side bar with four icons at the top. Select the dimensioned square icon, de-select “Lock Aspect Ratio,” and set the size of your image to 11 inches wide by 17 inches high.

This shouldn’t distort things too much if your cover is a standard book size. Otherwise, you can reset the slide size to exactly match your image proportions. One last thing is needed to prepare your image: Ctl+X to cut it, right click the empty slide and select the “Paste Options/Picture” (empty clipboard on the right). This ensures that the picture is in a format that PowerPoint likes (it’s Microsoft after all) and that you get the full 150 ppi resolution.

Close the “Format Picture” side bar, hit the “View” tab, and open the “Selection Pane.” There should be only one item, your cover image. Chances are, it will be named “Picture 2.” You can click on the text and rename it. There’s also a handy little ‘eye’ icon that will turn the selected item on and off. As you get more items on the slide, the selection pane can be used to re-order them.

 Now the stars. Hit the “Home” tab, go to “Drawing” and hit the little barred triangle that reveals all of the shapes (oh look, a smiley face… nah). Select the five pointed star and place it on your cover image. Drag it to the right size and then use the little yellow ‘handle’ to make it skinny (yellow square just inside the star). Now right click your star and you’ll see a handy little sub-menu with “Style,” “Fill,” and “Outline.” Set “Outline” to “No Outline,” and select a “Fill” color of your choice.

So you’ve got your cover and a star. Now’s the fun part, leave your selection pane open, hit the “Animations” tab, and open the “Animation Pane.” Then select your star, open the “Advanced Animation/Add Animation” tab, and select “Entrance/Zoom.” Missed it? Click “Play” in the Animation Pane to see it again. The little green bar shows that the entrance effect will take 0.5 seconds. Click on the right edge of the bar and you can drag it out to extend the entrance time as long as you would like. You can also delay the start, or drag the entire bar earlier or later. At the bottom is your timeline where you can see the entire animation timing sequence by scrolling back and forth.

 To add the “Exit.” Open “Advanced Animations/Add Animation,” select “Exit/Float Out,” then click “Effect Options” and hit the ‘Up-Arrow.’ Now, almost done with the star. Click ‘5-Point Star’ on the “Selection Pane” to highlight both entrance and exit animations, then hit “Timing/Start” and select “With Previous.” To view the full effect, go to the orange bar on the bottom of your screen and hit the icon that looks kinda like a little projection screen (or maybe an Alien from Planet Booblob, go ask Microsoft). If a star appears, and then floats up while fading away, you’ve got it.

More stars? Easy. Select your star, CTL+C then CTL+V for about ten duplicates. Select each one and drag it around on your image to get the effect you want. Now set the first star to appear with about a 0.5 delay and stagger the remainder so that each one starts a little after the previous. You can drag the timing bars about to vary the durations, but the best effect is obtained by starting the “Entrance” and “Exit” actions at the same time. Note that a second is a long time in an animation like this and my overall duration is only 6.0 seconds. Take a look at the screen-shot below to see how the sequence should work.

Hit the little Alien dude to play it. Then mess with positions, timing, and whatnot until you like the results. There, done… just about. Save. Then open the “File” tab, hit “Save As,” select your folder, then open the “Save as type:” menu to select “MPEG-4 Video (*.mp4)” and “Save.” You can open the video in your computer’s mp4 player to check it out. Good? Then open Giphy.com in your browser and follow the directions. Be sure to set the start at 0.00 and the end time to match your animation (<10 seconds). Save your masterpiece and voilà!

There’s a lot more you can do with the PowerPoint Animation tools. Part 2 shows how to use "Remove Background"  and "Path" to create an animation like this one:

Sales History

First book in a three-book series for the Kindle Worlds Foreworld Saga came out in late March 2015. The graph below shows relative sales volume over time. In the first three months after release, the owning authors of the Foreworld Saga had releases of their own that I think tent-poled my own launch (thank you Neal Stephenson). A later release by Mark Teppo gave me a bump as well.

In January, Amazon marked my book down to half the normal price and I saw another nice little bump. Same in July. However, from the graph, you can see that the half-price month essentially cannibalized sales from the following months. The second in my series came out at the end of August and I am seeing a noticeable uptick in sales of book one. I don’t have numbers for October yet, but the pattern should follow.




 A few other items of note:

1. Actual royalties amount to about two nice cases of California reserve, old-vine Zin. So the hope that springs eternal can be washed down with something more substantial. 
2. KW is all e-books, Amazon only. Print and other sales channels may react differently.
3. Amazon does not announce a half-price sale in advance (even to the authors) so there’s no way to promote it until it happens.
4. Second in series did not enjoy the popularity spike of the first book. I think that’s because the underlying Foreworld series itself is getting a little old. 

 Don’t know if this is of much help to anyone, but I do think it is indicative of sales patterns that most new authors can expect. And yes, there will be a third and final volume in the series. I’m really, really gonna need another case of Zin pretty soon.

On Writing an Author Profile

I have found that one of the hardest things for an independent author to write is their own Author’s Profile. Therefore, I looked at the Amazon Author Page profiles for fifty well-known fiction authors selected at random from best-seller lists and my own reading preferences. I then combed through them to find thirty common elements (including word count) and the frequency of their occurrence. I understand that many authors have book-jacket profiles or website profiles as well, but to keep the comparison “apples-to-apples,” I only reviewed the Amazon listings. The graph below shows word count vs. number of author profiles.

This is by no means a scientific study or even a statistically significant sample, but it could be helpful for independent authors in preparation of their own profiles. A few interesting observations:

• Of the fifty well-known authors selected, only 43 had a profile on Amazon and only 33% of those with a profile had any reference to web-sites or to social media.
• A surprising number of profiles were out of date, some by over five years.
• Although the average count is over 200 words, I found the most effective profiles to be about 125 words in length. This roughly corresponds with the median length of 111 words.
• The wordiest profiles tended to either list books (too many in my opinion) or contain detailed author biographies.
• Author profiles tended to either describe the author or to describe the author’s works. In my opinion, the most effective profiles had a balance.
• The first person profiles were not (in my opinion) very effective. A small inclusion of informal language can be effective, but over-use detracted from the profile.

A full compilation of my findings is given in the table below. There are 31 elements ranging from general observations, through biographical details, to literary accomplishments and miscellany. Obviously these are not all-inclusive but they do represent common elements in the profiles of well-known, successful authors.

TOPIC	STAT	COMMENT
Average Word Count	208	Minimum was under 30, maximum over 1,000
Median Word Count	111	Half of the biographies had 111 words or less
Male	53%	Relatively balanced male to female author ratio
First Person	9%	Less than 10% were written in first person
Informal Narrative	26%	Contained slang, direct expressions, superlatives, or hyperbole
Sequential Biography	21%	Narrative biography of events in sequential order beginning at youth
Biography Dates	28%	Specific dates of biographical events
Anecdotes	35%	Past or current biographical anecdotes
Home State	60%	Current state (or country) of residence including implied locations
Home City	37%	Current city of residence
Place of Birth	28%	Specific city or state where born
Former Addresses	30%	Intermediate cities or states of residence
Former Careers	40%	Careers pursued prior to becoming an author
Marital Status	35%	Current marital (or life-partner) status
Spouse Name	19%	Current spouse’s given name
Children/other Fam.	37%	Reference to children or non-specific “family”
Pets	5%	Reference to pets
Charities	12%	Active participation in charity or volunteer work
Hobbies	26%	Current hobbies, avocations or sports
Travel	23%	Travel that is not related to change of address
Academic Credentials	35%	Academic degree, awards, or teaching engagements
Best Seller	58%	Best-selling author or author of best-selling book
Awards	58%	Literary awards such as Pulitzer, Caldwell, or Newbury
Genre	44%	Mentions particular genres or writing style
Specific Books	84%	Mentions specific books in publication or expected (not series names)
Number of Books	28%	States the number of published books (not total in-print or sold)
Release Dates	35%	Mentions release dates in connection with specific books
Radio/TV/Movie	47%	Appearances, participation or presentation in audio/visual media
Website/Blog	33%	Includes any internet reference or social media
Foreign Publication	42%	Mentions translations or international publication
Other Authors	19%	Names co-authors or other associated author references

In conclusion, I've highlighted some of the more common profile elements and noted some items that may be useful in preparing your own Author's Profile: 

• Keep the narrative between 100 and 200 words, using a third-person POV with a minimum of informal language.
• A sequential biography with specific dates is probably not useful unless it illustrates the Author's unique expertise in the subject matter; i.e., Vietnam vet, Holocaust survivor. Same with anecdotes.
• Localization is important. Readers want to know where the Author lives and perhaps a little about the Author's family.
• Credentialing is important. Best seller status, awards, academic achievement, media appearances and foreign publication all help establish an Author's credibility. 
• Titles and Genre are a fundamental part of an Author's profile.
• And certainly not least, the Author profile needs to provide direct links to a web-site, blog, social media, mailing list contact, and on-line distributors.