I’m just back from the recent Presentation Summit where I had a chance to hang out with many old and new friends including Tom Howell from Australia’s Synapsis Creative. Tom is the newest PowerPoint MVP, and one of the things I love about the MVPs is that each comes to the PowerPoint with a very different perspective and skillset.

Tom’s specialty is using PowerPoint to author professional videos exploiting the program’s powerful, but often overlooked animation and video output features. Tom did a session at the Summit breaking down exactly how his studio creates videos for brands such as Coca-Cola, P&G and Nestle. Occasionally, he will use live video mixed in with graphics, but usually these videos all make use of vector-based objects, illustrations and text. I won’t go through Tom’s whole process and workflow, but one of the advantages to working in PowerPoint that he stresses is the ability to storyboard and author all within the same program, saving a great deal of time. Synapsis is gaining more and more clients who want a social media video executed in under 48 hours, and apparently that’s something they can do.

Oh, and he also said that they rarely use Morph which I found fascinating.

Check out an example of their PowerPoint video work above, and see their whole portfolio here.

And check out their blog as well.