Cuing Working Memory with Preliminary Slide Backgrounds
One of the big benefits of using the BBP Story Template is that you easily see how all your ideas relate to one another in the Word document. The story template is a particularly effective organizing tool for the Act II scenes because it shows you a visual hierarchy of your ideas. In each column, you write out the headlines in descending order of importance from top to bottom and add columns of information from left to right.
But when you transform the story template into a storyboard, you lose the template’s ability to show you the hierarchy of your ideas. Every slide you see in Slide Sorter view looks as though it carries the same visual weight, and each slide follows the next in an undifferentiated sequence.
To be able to quickly see your built-in informational hierarchy in Slide Sorter view and begin to address the need to provide visual cues for working memory, you’ll apply custom layouts with special backgrounds that indicate the presentation’s organization. These custom layouts will be only temporary while you sketch your storyboard.Using the BBP Storyboard Formatter, you’ll apply a custom layout with a dark gray background to your Call to Action slide, a custom layout with a medium gray background to the Key Point slides, a custom layout with a light gray background to the Explanation slides, and a custom layout with a white background to the remaining Act I and Detail slides.
Finding Your Slides
Keep a printout of the Word version of the story template handy as you locate the corresponding slides on the storyboard. If you have trouble finding slides because the slides are too large or the headlines are too small, click and drag the handle on the Zoom bar to increase or decrease magnification of Slide Sorter view. Try counting slides to find the slides you’re seeking—for example, once you have located a Key Point slide, you know that an Explanation slide follows directly after it, and you count three Detail slides after that one to find the next Explanation slide, and three Detail slides after that to find the third Explanation slide.
To color-code these slides in Slide Sorter view, click Ctrl+A to select all the slides in the presentation. On the Home tab, in the Slides group, click Layout, and on the drop-down menu, click the layout titled Detail Sketches, as shown in Figure 6-5. Now select the Call to Action slide, click Layout, and on the drop-down menu, click the layout titled CTA Sketch. Next select the first Key Point slide, hold down Ctrl and click to select the second and third Key Point slides, and then click Layout again, and on the drop-down menu, click the layout titled Key Point Sketches.
FIGURE 6-5 Applying the Detail Sketches custom layout to all the slides in Slide Sorter view using the custom layouts included in the BBP Storyboard Formatter.
Next click the first Explanation slide, hold down Ctrl and select the rest of the Explanation slides, and then click the Layout button, and on the drop-down menu click the layout titled Explanation Sketches. Finally, click the first Setting slide, hold down Shift and select the Point B slide, and then click the Layout button, and on the drop-down menu click the layout titled Act I Sketches.
Note
Scroll through your slides as you read the headlines, and check them against the printout of your story template to make sure you have applied the layouts properly. If you made a mistake, select the slide, click the Layout button, and select the correct layout to apply it. Your storyboard should now look like Figure 6-6.
FIGURE 6-6 Slide Sorter view, showing the Call to Action slide with a dark gray background, the Key Point slides with medium gray backgrounds, the Explanation slides with light gray backgrounds, and the Detail slides with white backgrounds.
As you scroll through the slides of the presentation in sequence, the change in color of the backgrounds from dark gray to medium gray to light gray to white indicates you have made a transition to a new point that corresponds to Act I or the three columns in the storyboard. This transition should also be reinforced by your spoken words when you deliver the presentation.
Even though the shaded backgrounds are only temporary, already the contrast of the different shades of color calls attention to the three levels of hierarchy—the dark gray color calls attention to the most important Call to Action slide, the medium gray to the Key Points slides, the light gray next to the Explanation slides, and the white color to the Detail slides. Stick with these backgrounds for now so that you’ll be able to sketch over the backgrounds as you work in the storyboard.
Practicing scaling to time
However, at the last minute, you might need to scale down your presentation from 45 minutes to 15 or even 5 minutes. Now practice how easy it is to do that with only a few clicks of the mouse. Follow these steps in Slide Sorter view to scale the storyboard to time by hiding the slides you don’t need to use in the presentation:
■ If you’re giving a 45-minute presentation, do nothing—all your slides will appear to your audience.
■ To prepare a 15-minute presentation, hold down the Ctrl key and click the white Detail slides throughout the presentation. With all the Detail slides selected, right-click any Detail slide, and then select Hide Slide. Now only the Act I, Key Point, and Explanation slides will appear when you give the presentation; the Detail slides will be hidden. View the result by pressing the F5 key to start the slide show from the first slide. Press the Esc key to return to Slide Sorter view.
■ To prepare a 5-minute presentation, complete the tasks for a 15-minute presentation, but in addition to selecting the white Detail slides, select the light gray Explanation slides, and then right-click any Explanation or Detail slide and select Hide Slide. Now only the Act I and Key Point slides will appear during the presentation; the rest of the Act II slides are hidden. Test the result by pressing the F5 key. Press the Esc key to return to Slide Sorter view.
When you use the Hide Slide feature, a hidden slide icon containing the slide number is displayed in the lower-right corner of each slide in Slide Sorter view. To reset the hidden slides to make them viewable again during a presentation, select the hidden slides, right-click any slide, and click Hide Slide again—the hidden slide icon will disappear. Keep in mind that hidden slides don’t appear on screen when you run a presentation, but they will be printed unless you clear the Print Hidden Slides check box in the Print dialog box.
When you hide the slides as you scale to time, you maintain a single presentation file that has the flexibility to accommodate different-length presentations. Because of the hierarchy of ideas you wrote into Act II, you can scale your presentation up or down to time without losing the core integrity of the story—with only a few clicks of your mouse.
Editing Your Headlines If needed
As you practiced scaling to time in Slide Sorter view, you might have noticed that some of the headlines extend beyond the two-line limit or have text that is unevenly balanced between the two lines—to fix that, you need to master the basics of editing headlines, described in the section "Tip 4: Edit the Headlines" later in this topic. In Normal view, scroll through all the slides, and when you find a headline that exceeds the two-line limit of the title area, edit it down to size. Sometimes you reduce a headline’s length simply by deleting a word or two, without affecting its meaning. At other times, you might have to revise and restructure the wording of a headline to make it fit. To force a headline to break to the next line so that the two lines are evenly distributed, position the cursor after any word in a headline and then press Enter. Always stick with the two-line limit for headlines to maintain consistency in the presentation, to leave ample room for visuals, and to challenge yourself to be as concise as possible.
