This was the first project we did in google slides. usually slides is used as a simple tool for presentations, but this time we were tasked with using the slides to make a stopmotion slideshow. stopmotion is something i've rarely dabbled in but i am very familiar with video, so i did a live action stop motion slideshow using a video camera. i recorded a 60 frame per second video, then i edited the video to include the jumpcut special effect. then i sorted through each frame of the video and picked out the frames that emphasized motion (animation keyframes) and deleted the rest. i converted each frame to a JPEG file and further trimmed out any unnecessary parts. i then manually put the frames back in order and assigned each frame its own slide. this way, if you rapidly click the next slide button, you get to see a nice little stop motion video. to the left is the final product.
The next thing i had to do was make a short animation using the built in transition feature in google slides. i was limited to only using 3 slides maximum. the problem was that the google slides transition feature doesn't allow for precise animation. you are limited to making objects fly in from off screen and stop at one predetermined location, or have objects fly out from their location to somewhere off screen. it's impossible to make an object move from one location on screen to another, you are only limited to having objects appear and disappear in different ways. this posed difficult as i wanted to make it look like you are playing an actual arcade game when suddenly everything breaks. video games require much more movement than what is allowed in google slides. the way i got around this was to make transparent holes in images and animate the object underneath. this way it makes it look like it stopped at a precise location when really it is just being blocked from view by what is in front of it. i also heavily employed the use of GIF images as they can be used to make built in animations, adding another layer of movement. the main character in the game is custom made as it is actually a gif of me walking on a treadmill that was traced by hand frame by frame and made into pixel art. as a matter of fact, all of the assets i used in this are custom made by me (except for the background for level 1, that is taken from Pokemon sapphire for the gameboy advance from 2002). all the error codes are actual error codes from arcade games that i recreated by hand. this took incredibly long only for me to realize that the only thing i had to compare it to was the teacher's example animation where a png image of a car drives off screen, then drives on screen again (all in perfectly straight lines), then does a 360. then i realized i spent way more time in google slides than what is considered at all healthy.
Finally, I had to make a slide in the standard presentation format. I had to do a presentation of a hobby, skill, or something i simply find interesting. it had to be generally sparely worded and include pictures. i spent hours on ideas that kept hitting a dead-end. finally, i decided to work on a presentation about Barefoot waterskiing with some help from my dad. after eventually finishing the project minutes before the deadline (it only took so long because i spent hours on ideas and topics that didn't work), i reflected on how cool it looked. despite being in a simple format, with a standard theme, it managed to turn out really well simply due to the topic and the content itself.
