People Animation in PowerPoint

This sample presentation shows you how you can use motion path animations in PowerPoint on ungrouped vector objects to create a very effective introduction or section slide.

In this example, we used a vector image we sourced from iStockphoto. We wish to thank Tina Riedner from iStockphoto for permission to use this sample vector image to demonstrate this technique.

Figure 1 shows you the original vector image of a group of silhouetted people in Adobe Illustrator. You can buy a license for the same image at iStockphoto if you want to follow this part of the tutorial.


Figure 1: Original vector in Adobe Illustrator

We then ungrouped all the people to individual persons, and exported each of them as EMF graphics from within Adobe Illustrator. Although we used Illustrator, you can achieve the same results even with other similar programs like Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer, CorelDRAW, Xara Xtreme, etc.

Figure 2 shows the several ungrouped, individual people silhouettes that we exported as individual EMF graphics.


Figure 2: Exported individual EMF graphics

Although the original iStockphoto graphic had nine people, we ended up using just seven of them.

We then assembled all these people on a PowerPoint slide using the Insert Picture options.

Figure 3 shows how all the assembled silhouette people look.

Figure 3: Assembled silhouette

We then added motion path animations to all the individual silhouette people graphics. Learn more about motion paths in the Animations section of our Learning PowerPoint series.

You can also download the sample PowerPoint file for this animation technique here.

We then made changes to the fill, outline, and transparency attributes of the silhouette people, and created a few more slide variations, as you can see in Figure 4.


Figure 4: Slide variations