Keynote | Moultrie Creek Gazette

Storytelling with Keynote

April 22, 2013 11:08 am , Leave a Comment , Denise Barrett

Since my favorite storytelling format is a digital hybrid somewhere between a journal and a scrapbook, I need a software platform that supports a broad range of features. My favorite storytelling platform has to be Keynote, Apple’s presentation graphics app. You may be more familiar with presentation graphics for building . . . presentations, but you will be pleasantly surprised to discover they have a creative side too. Keynote, along with Microsoft’s PowerPoint, Corel’s WordPerfect Presentations and OpenOffice’s Impress apps, are also very nice scrapbooking platforms. My storytelling style could be described as a scrapbook with plenty of journaling.

This storytelling style is probably not the best format for a traditional family history. Presentation graphics apps support text, but they are not very good writing platforms. Text does not automatically paginate when you fill up one page and spell-check is probably the only writing-support feature. In my case, I’m building my book from a series of short stories – most of which began as blog posts. I’m blogging my stories as the research/inspiration/memory/whatever motivates them. Later, they may become an element in a digital scrapbook. These scrapbooks will continue to grow as new stories are added. But that’s the joy of digital (one of many, actually). Just add it to the existing project and move things around until it all fits together the way you want.

Since the wordsmithing is already done, my focus is on finding the right supporting media (photos, video and audio) and building an attractive page layout. Although presentation apps all have a number of themes, giving you instant design capabilities, most are focused on the business world. We are beginning to see a few photo book themes appear, but I prefer to begin with a basic white theme and a blank slide.

In this example, the story is about sounds I remember from my childhood in the 1950s. One of those memories is of the shrimp boats motoring out in the early morning. Shrimp boats weren’t often included in my family’s Kodak moments back then so I had to make do with something more recent. This is a photo I took recently and the large amount of sky in the shot meant it had potential as the background to the story’s text. There was one small problem. As a color photo, the picture was the focus – not the text. By using a cheap photo-art app, I converted the photograph to a monochrome sketch which not only allowed the text to stand out, but gave it a vintage look too.

Traditional scrapbooks – especially those created prior to the digital age – are often an eclectic collection of memorabilia and stories. Because older scrapbooks didn’t always offer the ability to add or rearrange pages, they offered a somewhat chronological look at the events, people and things that person found interesting. Thanks to apps like Keynote, we can build stories in whatever order they come to us, save them into one or more presentation files and rearrange the order of individual stories within a file at any time. It’s as easy as dragging slides up and down the slide view panel.

Not only do my presentation/scrapbook projects fit my style, they are also a big hit with my family – including the younger ones. My goal is to tell the stories of the people who were a part of my life and show them as the fun and fascinating characters they were – not just vital records in a genealogy database. Storytelling with Keynote helps make that happen.

Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: Keynote, page layout, personal publishing, scrapbooking

Digital Storytelling: Picture Books

April 2, 2013 7:30 am , Leave a Comment , Denise Barrett

This edition of Digital Storytelling looks at using your presentation software to create picture books. No, this is not the place to write and edit your stories, but it does work well for combining a collection of blog posts into an easily distributable book format. In addition, what you are looking at below is an embedded version of the original publication – which has been published at Scribd. You can view the entire guide here and even download a PDF copy for future reference.

View this document on Scribd

Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: Keynote, photos, picture books, PowerPoint, presentation graphics, Scribd

Digital Storytelling – Playing with Papers

March 22, 2013 9:30 am , 2 Comments , Denise Barrett

This article was originally published on April 20, 2011.

When it comes to digital scrapbooking, I would be the square peg that just doesn’t fit into that round hole. I prefer Keynote to Photoshop as a scrapbooking platform and I’m usually designing for the rectangular screen rather than the square papers. Yes, it’s a challenge, but it’s just as much fun and I love the results.

One of the biggest challenges is playing with papers on my slides. Generally, I don’t use a background paper because it adds exponentially to the file size of the books I’m building. It also makes it more difficult to include large expanses of smallish text and maintain readability. I still love the layouts that involve stacking layers of different papers with photos, frames and other embellishments. The problem is that when you pull a “sheet” of paper onto your page, then try to resize it, Keynote wants to maintain its aspect ratio. That means if you want to turn that square-shaped paper into a rectangle, Keynote says it ain’t gonna happen.

Here’s where Shapes become your new best friend.

Using Keynote, you can place any number of shaped elements on your slide – squares, circles, rectangles, stars, arrows and more. Once you place a shape on the slide, you can resize it, color it, change its border and add a fill from a file. BINGO!

I start in Finder using the Cover Flow view. Most kits include an image showing you its contents. I find these images handy to identify coordinating papers for my current slide. From there, I scroll through the files – still in Cover Flow – to find the ones I will use. In this example, I’ll be using onelittlebird_storyteller_pp09.jpg.

Now, I go back to Keynote and place a shape on the slide. What you see here is a blue rounded square. Color, border and size will be adjusted later. In the Information Panel, you can see that this shape is filled with an Image Fill. The square thumbnail shows which image is currently in use. From here you can click the Choose button and find the paper file you want to use for your fill or you can drag the file from Finder and drop it on the thumbnail in the Information Panel.

Okay, I know this is looking very strange. This digital paper is a high resolution image and you’re seeing it at its max. Choose the selector just below Image Fill in the Information Panel and change it to Scale to Fill. As you see below, that makes a big difference.

From here you can pull any of the handles to resize the shape, even stretch it from a square to a rectangle. The fill will scale to meet your changes. Use the Stroke section of the Information Panel to change or get rid of the border. The Shadow and Reflection sections offer some interesting effects too. Here’s the final result.

This layout uses papers from the Storyteller kit at Oscraps.com.

Posted in: Digital Storytelling, Feature , Tagged: background papers, digital scrapbooking, Keynote, shapes

Scrapshot – Pirate Gold

March 9, 2013 9:30 am , 2 Comments , Denise Barrett

This is one of the toughest layouts I’ve created. My first thought was to have the text flow contained within the dirt road, but Keynote doesn’t do lop-sided text boxes. The photo was very busy so I converted it into a painting and toned the color down to something a bit more monochromatic. That helped. It also gives it a ghostly look – perfect for the story’s topic. Adding a solid color shape behind the text box also helped – even after turning the opacity down so that it’s almost invisible. Adding a blurred “frame” to the edge of the shape makes it even less obvious. The text is still too small, but it was the only way I could keep all that text on that page. Using white text with a shadow helps it pop off the page.

Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: featured, Keynote

Custom eCards with Keynote

February 4, 2013 7:30 am , Leave a Comment , Denise Barrett

I’m a big fan of Hallmark’s ecards. The artwork is gorgeous, but my favorite cards are the simpler ones that combines photos, artwork and text with music and motion to create an elegantly simple sentiment that’s perfect for just about any occasion. It dawned on me the other day as I was searching for an appropriate anniversary card, that the technical side of these cards was really quite simple and can be done with any presentation graphics program. Although I don’t have anywhere near the artistic inspiration of the Hallmark designers, that won’t stop me from trying my hand at creating my own cards.

This Valentine example is used to give you an idea what you can do with the builds and actions component of Keynote. I’ve limited the elements to text with background music for demonstration purposes, but any element – photo, text, graphic, etc. – can be used to add movement to your card. Here’s how to make your own. Click on any image to see it full size.

As you can see here, this card consists of only one slide. Begin by adding a background and then including the text that will be a part of the card. Once that’s done, open the Inspector panel and select the builds and actions panel. Now select the first object that will be set up with a build effect. In this example, it’s the “I love you” text object.

This object will only get a Build In effect. In this case, I’ve chosen the Dissolve effect, set the delivery to “All at Once” and the duration to 2.50 seconds. By the way, the Build Order panel is visible because I clicked the Open Drawer at the bottom of the Build pane. When you have a lot of objects on a slide, this makes it easier to keep track of which one is doing what and when.

Next, I selected the “every day” text object and assigned a Drift effect to it with the Left to Right Direction setting. It is the second object to move into my card so it’s number 2 in the build order. I’ve also set a duration time for this object. Notice at the bottom of the drawer that you can define what initiates this build and, if it’s set to automatic as this one is, how long after the previous object finishes whatever it was doing before this object begins doing its thing (Delay).

The “every minute” object gets the same treatment as number 3 in the build order. Don’t forget the Start Build and Delay settings in the Drawer.

The last object, “ALWAYS”, is selected and set up with the Dissolve effect and the timings are set. Click on the Play button in the toolbar to view the entire presentation and check how your effects work. Try other effects until you’ve got your card set up the way you want it.

Of course I’m going to include background music for my card. I found the perfect 30-second clip of royalty-free music in the Vimeo Music Store. This one is Gentle Harp by Jack Waldenmaier and cost me a whopping $1.99. Drag the music file (a .wav file in this case) into the Soundtrack box on the Audio pane in the Inspector and set it to play once. After the Keynote presentation has been saved, I hit the play button to play the slideshow. My original timing was about 3 seconds short of the 30-second music clip so I adjusted the timing of each of my effects to stretch them out a bit longer until everything was just right. Once everything was the way I wanted, I saved the presentation again.

Now, to turn this presentation into a movie file. From the File menu, choose the Record Slideshow command then sit back and watch your masterpiece do its thing. When the presentation is finished, click anywhere on the screen to complete the recording. Choose the File > Export > Quicktime command and when the Quicktime settings panel appears (example below), choose your Formats option (I chose Full Quality, Large in this example) and uncheck the “Include the slideshow recording” option, then click the Next button.

You’ll be asked to name and define where to save the resulting movie file. A small popup window appears to show the progress of the export function. When it goes away, your ecard video is complete. You can open and view it in Quicktime. Quicktime also includes functions (File > Share command) to email your creation or upload it to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Vimeo.

That’s the basics for creating your own ecard. Cruise Hallmark or your favorite ecard platform for design inspiration, then see if you can’t create your own.

Posted in: Projects , Tagged: cards, ecards, Keynote, PowerPoint

Keynote Scrapbooking Tips

December 12, 2012 9:00 am , 3 Comments , Denise Barrett

I’m still experimenting with storytelling ideas for my Barker family in Georgia. Once again, my storytelling tool of choice is Keynote [Mac - $20 and iOS - $5], the presentation graphics app included in Apple’s iWork suite. It comes with loads of great themes and companies like Jumsoft provide even more. In this example, I’m using the Parchment theme.

Since this is presentation graphics software, it handles all kinds of charts and diagrams easily. Custom family tree diagrams can be drawn quickly using a style that matches the theme of the project. Yes, this is a manual effort, but the custom results are well worth it. The photograph in the background also takes advantage of Keynote functionality. Keynote offers several design options to frame photographs included on a slide. One of those is an edge blur. By blurring the edge then reducing the opacity of the image itself, it becomes part of the background – enhancing the family chart rather than competing with it.

Here’s one example where scrapbooking techniques and presentation techniques have been combined. Graphical elements have been layered and shadows added to give them impact. The Keynote theme’s styles for fonts and colors are being used for the journaling on the page. Journaling has been kept relatively short with lots of images telling their own part of the story.

The schoolhouse in the bottom right corner was a black and white copy machine copy of an old photo. By cutting out the distracting clutter in the sky around the building, tinting it to match the slide’s color scheme and adjusting the opacity to let it blend into the corner of the slide, I was able to give a poor quality image the historical importance it deserves. And, while the class photo is also tinted to match the theme, the ragged white frame and shadowing allow it to stand out next to the school image.

Keynote – and other presentation apps – offer a lot of useful functionality and plenty of creative leeway, making them great platforms for any number of family history projects. They make it easy to combine text and images, create diagrams and add new pages any place within the project. They also offer any number of ways to share the final product. Keynote can export the presentation to a PowerPoint file, a PDF document, individual image files or a QuickTime movie. And, you can post your presentation at online platforms like Slideshare to take advantage of Keynote’s multimedia capabilities. Both of these platforms support animations and sound, however the user experience will depend on the operating system and browser used to view the result.

Presentations graphics aren’t just for the board room. They are becoming an impressive component of the family historian’s digital storytelling toolbox.

Posted in: Digital Storytelling, Personal Publishing , Tagged: Jumsoft, Keynote, presentation software

Project Life in Digits

November 10, 2012 11:01 am , Leave a Comment , Denise Barrett

What is Project Life? from Becky Higgins LLC on Vimeo.

I’m fascinated with the idea behind Project Life, but not overly enthused with the process. I do think that having a quick and easy way to capture our own family stories and present them in an attractive manner is a wonderful idea. The scaled-down approach advocated by Becky Higgins is terrific, but I want a digital solution that can easily be created and shared. Fortunately, I already have the perfect app for that – my presentation software.

Keynote, PowerPoint, Presentations and Impress each have the features needed to create a digital scrapbook and the flexibility to make it as simple or complex as I wish. And, unlike the physical story book, each digital project can be shared in a number of creative ways. For basic scrapbooks, I can export to PDF format which results in a nice digital package that can be posted online, emailed to friends and family, printed on my printer or even sent out to become a book. Export the slides as individual images and they can be displayed on my digital frame or even on my television. I can kick things up a notch by adding audio and even video to my presentation. These multimedia projects can be exported to video format and shared by email or through a video-sharing platform.

Title page from the Leather Book template on Keynote.

I can put most of my existing digital scrapbooking graphics to work in my presentations, but the easiest way to get started is using one of the included presentation templates. Granted, most are designed for business presentations, but there are a number of simple designs which make very nice scrapbook albums. In Keynote, I like the Vintage and Leather Book templates. My PowerPoint app [from Office 2008 for Mac] came with a gorgeous template called Classic Photo Album. Each template comes with a number of page layouts. PowerPoint calls them slide layouts while Keynote calls them masters. Again, most of the layouts have to do with business presentations and are full of bullet points or charts, but each has one or more title layouts as well as a blank layout – showing only the theme’s background. Those are the ones I use the most.

Photos and captions arranged manually on a blank layout master.

Although recent templates are including more photo layout options, I often find myself using the simple blank layout. It includes the template’s background but not much else. That gives me room to do what I want. If I choose a fairly simple background like the cream-colored pages in this example, I can quickly dress it up with some digital journaling “cards”. Over at The LilyPad there’s a delicious collection of journal cards to fit just about any kind of theme. The example below is from two of my favorite designers.

Using my presentation app as a scrapbooking tool is quick, easy and offers many interesting ways to share my creative efforts. Why not take your app for a test drive and see if you don’t find it as enjoyable as I do. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: Impress, Keynote, PowerPoint, presentations, Project Life, scrapbooking

A Letter Archive Option

November 1, 2012 8:00 am , 2 Comments , Denise Barrett

You can help the Salvation Army and Red Cross help storm victims through your donations.

There’s an interesting discussion in the Technology for Genealogy group on Facebook about handling letters – scanning, transcribing and displaying them. It’s a great discussion and full of useful suggestions. Since I’m also working on a collection of letters, it’s been very helpful.

Grandpa’s letters.

My project is a collection of letters my grandfather sent my grandmother before they got married. She came to the tiny Holland, Georgia, community to teach school in 1908. There, she met my grandfather. She was only there for one year before moving on to teach at other rural schools around Georgia. For the next five years, they corresponded – and met occasionally – until he finally convinced her to marry him in 1913. He died in 1921 so these letters and a few photos are our only connection to him.

I’m slowly scanning and transcribing the letters using Keynote, Apple’s presentation graphics app, as my publishing tool. As you can see here, each page of the letter gets its own slide with both the page’s image and its transcription. I chose Keynote because it is a very flexible platform. Each slide can be treated as a separate entity to be quickly reordered or even pulled out of one presentation file and inserted into another. I can quickly export a presentation as a PDF document, an HTML slideshow or a video. I even have the ability to export each slide as an individual image file.

Currently I’m building each letter as a separate presentation file, but as this archive grows, so do my options for creating things from them. For example, I can pull out an individual slide as a graphic image to include it as a figure in a document. I can combine several letter files – like those discussing a trip to Lookout Mountain – with photos to build a slideshow documentary. Add some narration and that slideshow can become a video documentary.

Keynote is my presentation app of choice, but PowerPoint, Presentations (from the WordPerfect suite) and Impress (from OpenOffice) all have the same capabilities and would all work for this type of project. And, if you’re looking for an online archive platform for these project files, Scribd can store and display them very quite nicely. You won’t get the multimedia capabilities of the online slide-sharing platforms, but your transcriptions will be searchable.

Take another look at your presentation software. You may find it has many uses for presenting your family’s history.

Posted in: Projects , Tagged: Impress, Keynote, letters, personal publishing, PowerPoint, presentation software

Digital Christmas Greetings

September 23, 2012 8:00 am , 1 Comment , Denise Barrett

I’m a big fan of Hallmark’s e-Cards. There’s a broad range of card types from simple to amazing. One of my favorite types is where they use text over images to present the greeting. The other day I was browsing through their collection looking for a birthday card when it dawned on me that I could build something very similar using Keynote (the Mac equivalent of PowerPoint). Both Keynote and PowerPoint support “actions” for elements included on a slide. These actions include things like having graphic or text elements appear and disappear, move, get larger or smaller and perform other interesting stunts. In addition, both support background music that can be played throughout the card’s presentation. You control the elements included on your card and the timing of every action, then once you’ve got everything just right, export the result to a movie file and upload it to your favorite movie-sharing platform or even Facebook.

Hmmmm . . .

So I pulled out my poinsettia collection, spent some time in the Vimeo Music Store looking for affordable Christmas music that I could legally use in my project, and started experimenting. While I’ll never reach Hallmark quality levels, I found that building the bones of a Hallmark-style card is quite simple. The only real advantage they have over us is their awesome images, graphics and fonts. But then, who wouldn’t prefer their family photos over professional images?

Create Christmas Cards with Keynote or PowerPoint from Moultrie Creek on Vimeo.

This example is only two slides – the first with the text and the second with photos – plus a music track. The resulting movie file is a respectable 45MB size. At this size, the file can easily be emailed or uploaded to Facebook. I could have added another slide or two and a few photos and still been well under Flickr’s 500MB movie size limit, however, the larger your movie file becomes, the more limited your sharing options.

Here are some ideas for digital cards:

If you want to get some family history into the mix, you might consider a photo card with a Christmas Carol theme that includes slides showing photos of Christmas Past, Christmas Present and Christmas Future.
Another option is to make your Christmas newsletter a Keynote (or PowerPoint) scrapbook of photos and captions describing the things your family has been doing. The trick here is to time your transitions to give viewers enough time to read those captions before the presentation moves on.
Capture a short video clip of your family in front of the Christmas tree saying “Merry Christmas”. Since digital cards provide instant delivery, you’re not at the mercy of the postal service and can wait until the tree is up and the house is decorated to capture the Christmas photos/videos you want to include. Yes, it does take time to produce the card, but you can do most of it in advance and drop in those pics/video clips at the last minute.
Why not start a new family tradition with a Christmas Highlights card sent after the holiday? It could include pictures from Christmas Day as presents are unwrapped or the family dinner along with messages for family and friends.

Putting your presentation program’s actions feature to work is surprisingly easy. While transition effects happen as your presentation moves from one slide to the next, actions happen on elements within a slide. In the example below, the text box “Joy” is the selected element and the action is to have it move into the slide from left to right. In Keynote there are Build Ins that determine how an element appears on the slide and Build Outs which determine how an element will be removed from the slide. Actions are things that happen to the element while it’s there. When you have multiple actions happening on a slide like I do here, you determine the order they will happen and the time (duration) before the next action takes place. You can also determine what triggers the action. In this project I have every action happening automatically based on order and timing, but if these slides were for a live presentation you would probably want the actions to wait until the presenter clicks the slide to move on.

Setting actions on a Keynote slide.

In this sample card, each of the words appears from a different direction using the Move In effect. The last action on this slide happens to the word, “Joy”, which scales to a larger size.

Keynote actions for displaying a photo stack.

Here you see the second slide with the photo stack. While you’re building your slides, you’ll stack your elements on the screen all at once, then assign the actions that will determine when and how they appear in the presentation and what happens to them later. In this example, the top photo is currently selected and it will be the third element to appear on the slide. The effect I’m using here is “Appear” and that’s exactly what happens. It will automatically appear on top of the second photo once that photo has had 5 seconds for people to look at it. The two previous photos will still be there stacked under the third. The last action is to have the Merry Christmas message appear across the bottom using what Keynote calls the “Typewriter” effect. The words appear character-by-character as if it’s being typed.

Because I’m using background music, I had to adjust the timings of most of these effects to have it all end at a good breaking point within the music clip. That can be the most time-consuming part of the entire process. You can look for music clips that are 10-15 second riffs which you set to repeat over and over again and provide atmosphere but aren’t as noticeable to the viewer – and are much easier to cut off when the rest of the production is done.

Although I’ve been discussing all these techniques from a Keynote point of view, you can do everything I’ve shown you here with PowerPoint. Regardless of the software you’re using, it will take some time to experiment with your app, discover the options available and learn what each effect does. The middle of the holiday hustle is not the best time to start experimenting. Try working on a Halloween card or Thanksgiving invitation to get the feel for actions and choose the ones you like best.

Oh, and if you’re as in love with the Hallmark fonts as I am, you can buy them at Fonts.com - just search for “HMK”.

Posted in: Digital Storytelling , Tagged: Christmas cards, Christmas letter, Keynote, PowerPoint

Digital Storytelling: Sketchbook Bio

May 17, 2012 7:30 am , Leave a Comment , Denise Barrett

Let’s start off with something quite simple – the sketchbook bio. It combines photos and text to tell a story. It reaches sketchbook status with the addition of a bit of style. In this case, most of the styling comes from the presentation theme, but as you’ll see here, simple things like fonts and frames can make a big difference.

View this document on Scribd