PowerPoint Videoscribe and Whiteboard Animations

PowerPoint animations are wide and varied, with the ability to videoscribe and create whiteboard/ink markings on slides to create striking effects.

Videoscribes are drawn time-lapse animations that look great and can create a striking visual impact. For this example, we’ve taken a simple black-and-white image of a pencil from Microsoft Clip Art. To access this, just click the Insert tab, then Pictures, and select Online Pictures from the dropdown menu. From here you can search for any kind of illustration; typing Clip Art into the search bar will give you a host of royalty-free images that will be useful for this effect.

Videoscribe Animations

To create a realistic time-lapse drawing of an object, you’ll want to separate the picture line by line. This will be most effective with a vector line-based illustration but will also work with a regular jpg image – however, you might need to crop it into smaller sections to achieve the same effect.

If you have a vector illustration, ensure it is all ungrouped into its individual line pieces. To ungroup a vector illustration:

Right-click on the image.

Select Group from the drop-down list.

Select Ungroup from the corresponding list.

Click Yes in the dialog box to proceed.

Repeat steps 5 – 8 until all ungroupings are complete.

To animate each of these line pieces to look like they are being drawn in, your best option is the Wipe effect. You can apply the animation individually to each line or apply it all at once and edit from there.

Select all ungrouped portions of the image.

Select the Animations tab.

Select Wipe from the Entrance Animation group. (The Exit Wipe will look like it is erasing).

Default Wipe animation will always wipe upwards. To make a realistic timelapse drawing, you will likely need to change the direction of the wipe the continue from the last one. You can change the direction by going to Effect Options beside your Animation effects. It will open a dropdown menu with different directions you can choose from, which are all the cardinal left, right, up, down directions. Play around with these and watch the previews so you can select the best one for your drawing.

Repeat until you have applied Wipe animations to all the lines in your drawing.

Now we need to time the animations so that they happen straight after each other, as if being drawn continuously. Select all the lines in your drawing. Then navigate to the  Timing  group.

Select After Previous in the start section.

Set an animation speed under duration: the shorter the time, the quicker the effect.

To ensure all these animations happen in the right order, open your Animation Pane.

If in the preview the animation doesn’t play exactly right, you can reorder the animations here by clicking and dragging each animation up or down the pane, or using the up and down arrows in the top right of this pane. Hit Play to check the animations are working in the right order.

To insert and edit a hand image:

Insert a picture of your hand holding a pen or marker into a slide.

Click on Picture Tools – Format in the navigation ribbon.

Click on Remove Background under the Adjust group. PowerPoint will mark background portions of the image in a fuchsia color.

Click on Mark Areas to Keep in the Refine  group of the Background Removal tab.

Click on points in the fuchsia area to add them to the final image.

Click Keep Changes in the Close group to finish.

In the above example, everything occurs as a single animation, using duration and delays to make the different elements work together.

Hand animation – Custom Path (drawn freehand), Start On Click, Duration 2.25

Top half of pencil – Wipe (From Top), Start With Previous, Duration 0.50, Delay 0.25

Bottom half of pencil – Wipe (From Top), Start With Previous, Duration 0.50, Delay 0.75

Whiteboard Animations 

PowerPoint’s Ink feature lets you draw directly on slides with your tablet or touch-screen device.

When opening PowerPoint on compatible devices, click the Draw tab. With a pen selected, you can freely draw on the screen as if it were a page on a notebook or a whiteboard. This can be great to quickly highlight or draw something.

After finishing your drawing, select it all then click on Ink Replay from the Draw tab. Alternatively, click the Animation tab and you’ll see an Animation effect just for your Ink drawings called Replay.

When drawing with Ink, PowerPoint will automatically start grouping ink lines that are close together and are similar in colour and thickness. This ensure when you fix little details of your drawing later, the replay will add it into the drawing sequence as if you had drawn it chronologically the first time.

If you want to change the order of the drawings, you’ll have to ungroup them by right-clicking, then clicking on Group > Ungroup in the menu that appears, and then re-apply the Replay animation on them individually. You can also reorder your Ink animations in your Animation Pane, just like any other animation.

Replay also accounts for layer order when replaying. If you notice only one line replaying late, for example, you can go into your Selection Pane by going to Home > Drawing > Arrange > Selection Pane and view the layer order there.

Find where the line is on your Selection Pane by clicking on it. It will highlight the corresponding name in the Pane. You can re-order the layers up or down by either clicking and dragging them or using the up and down arrows in the top right of the Pane. This is a good way of editing the Replay without needing to ungroup everything.