Jeai-cArlos Cl. Tee

The “USLT Presentation” is the first project featured in my portfolio that have been lost during the second mass data extinction back in 2005. It was a project for my Presentation Skills course and it’s pretty much worth my class standing, so I was exempted from attending classes. Anyways, the project required me to convert the old USLT Presentation in Microsoft Office PowerPoint to Adobe Flash so the school, the University of Saint Louis Tuguegarao (USLT), can use it during campaigns on graduating high school students.

I started working late 2003, during the Christmas vacation, with a copy of the original presentation. It was a lengthy presentation. It had information about the degrees and certifications the university offers, the achievements of the university and each school/college, a list of licensure exam topnotchers, you know, stuff that would make graduating high school students want to enroll in the university. With all that wonderful and somehow boring collection of slides, I was more interested with doing the Intro.

Flash. Flash. Flash. It was a buzzword then. I started with Flash because Kuya Bryan thought that it would make for good display during a regional IT seminar held in our university. It was his first time to author in Flash and he used SwishMAX then, a tool I don’t know how to use even now. We just copied some effects from this bundle of Flash movies he had and put together this looping movie less than a couple of minutes long.

As the early attendees entered the hall and got settled, we played the show for the first time, project on the stage. I watched from behind and all eyes was on the screen. At that moment, Flash was IN.

Now, I admit that I’m not a designer. I’m more of an organizer and I know how to best put pieces together. I have an eye for details and I know how to make things look clean and light with all parts complementing one another, everything just right. I wouldn’t call it creativity but somehow I come up with these stuff.

Okay, back to the presentation. It was to be authored in Macromedia Flash 2004 with graphics made in Adobe Photoshop 7.0. I found most of my resources from Kuya Bryan’s bundle including the text effects, sounds and sprites. Prior to the Intro, was a splash screen with a bouncing ball of light at the center that by clicking it starts the presentation.

The Intro was just over a minute long. Text like “On our 4oth year of excellent service… something, something” flashed on the screen. The individual schools and colleges were given a few seconds to highlight their individual achievements. At the very end, you can see the university emblem, which was made up of a sword, a shield a ribbon, some text and some other stuff, being put together as its pieces fly towards the light in the middle of the screen. It had some kind of edgy opera music that was heavy in bass. The music carried the whole introduction and made the biggest impact. I can still remember someone telling me that he had his heartbeat raised as he heard the music from the outside.

Four years later, I can only remember highlights from the introduction. The FLA document is gone and I don’t know if there is a surviving copy of the SWF file. It’s body, which made the bulk of the document, was just a slideshow much like a PowerPoint presentation. I had to create forward, back and pause buttons on a panel that showed or hid itself depending if the mouse was moved. The hardest part of doing this was formatting the content coming from the original PowerPoint presentation. Each slide was to be made that it wasn’t too heavy or too empty, that it only conveyed a single idea. Doing it in Macromedia Flash 2004 didn’t help either. If you knew how to use that application, you would agree. ‘Nough said.

The presentation was ready by the time they started the campaigns. I’m glad that the campaign goers got treated to something new this time. Hopefully, it did help to get the enlistment count rise. At some point though, I had to make a PowerPoint presentation version of the body so later, it’s easy for them to edit it. I had to separate the splash screen and Intro from the body. I also remember them asking me to create a special version for the Nursing campaign, for the young Nursing department.

Now, sitting here blogging about it, I’m proud of what I have accomplished and saddened that I may have lost all traces of the project. A really want to present to you even just the Intro. Hopefully, someone out there has a copy. E-mail me!

On batches that came, the Presentation Skills instructors encouraged students to develop in Flash. To promote this, one instructor, Sir Gil, organized a seminar on the tools relavant to the said subject. I was lucky enough to discuss about Flash for two consecutive years. I stressed that my time on the podium was indeed useless if they didn’t have the courage to try.