ISM contacted me to make a presentation that is better looking and more effective than their existing PowerPoint presentation.

The concept of the presentation is ISM's long-range overview and deep understanding of their market, so the working title of the presentation was The View from 35,000 Feet. They need to tailor the presentation to each audience, so I had to build in some flexibility. I created a simple, standalone "presentation builder" interface to allow the presenter to select options such as which screens they will show, the order of the screens, and some other customizations.

The presentation starts with an introductory sit screen that can stay up for many minutes while the audience members gather and prepare for the meeting. I shot and manipulated enough video to end up with several minutes of time-lapse cloud footage to add some interesting motion to the screen (without being too distracting and repetitive). When the presenter is ready to begin, the cloud footage provides the backdrop to an introductory animation.

One of the main visual elements is the animated alphabet that Leah Giberson and I developed for the ISM font. The letters grow in an intuitive, organic fashion without attempting to appear hand-drawn. The individual character creation is laborious, but once the alphabet is created, applying them to the screens is a quick process. I wrote some code that uses the TextSnapshot object to read in the position of static text on the stage in Flash and properly position our animated letters from the library. This was a huge time saver in the creation of the final output, as the presentation's script went through many rewrites during the course of development, even though we were working under an extremely tight deadline.

Displaying ISM's clients' logos needed a major update from the PowerPoint days of simply cramming all the logos that would fit onto one page. I animated the logos through code to emulate a camera flying through 3d space along the X, Y, and Z axes. I was also able to fake a shallow focal depth by using code to blur the elements further away from the camera.

We use flash video to introduce the members of ISM executive staff. The presenter uses the presentation builder interface to choose which members of the team to introduce.

ISM's work encompasses a variety of media, so the presentation accomodates swfs, static images, and video. There is also a standard sit screen in the client sections for when ISM wants to present print pieces that they have brought to the meeting.

The presenter has two ways to navigate the presentation: by using the arrow keys on the keyboard or with a simple, single-tiered menu. The menu is hidden for most of the presentation, but it scrolls out from the left when the presenter moves his cursor to the far left of the screen. The text in the menu is dynamically generated based on the selections that the presenter made using the presentation builder interface. The current section is highlighted, and there is a subtle highlight and fade as the user rolls over and off of the items.