Some Ideas for the Virtual Elevator Speech

I made a template Presentation for you to download and review.  It can be played in slideshow mode and then plays automatically, with background music.  The slides are meant as instructions on how to make your presentation.   So that covers the layout part.

Content-wise, the big deal is image selection.  Some thinking should go into what sort of image best represents the idea you want to communicate.  I expect that to be the bulk of the work, with there also some effort put into your slide titles to tie into the images and establish connections with your paper.  The images should be taken from the Internet, but don't use one which has a copyright notice on it.  Otherwise, everything is fair game, though do note we are a G-Rated class and your content should fit that requirement.

As to the music, it is best for it to be purely instrumental, no vocals.  This way the music complements the content on the slides and doesn't compete with it.  One possible source of such music is to find Karaoke versions of popular songs.  Here popular means for students, not for me.  Remember, other students in the class are your primary audience.  If you find such music on YouTube, there are many converters out there to make an mp3 (audio) file from the video.  I've used this one with good success.

You need to put in timings/transitions for the slides.  This requires a bit of arithmetic like this - if you have 20 slides and you want the presentation to run for 2 minutes then that is 10 slides per minute or 6 seconds per slide.  You don't need to have it completely uniform that way, but it is certainly easier.  Slides with a lot of text (you won't have many of these) should have some more time to allow the viewer to read what is on the slide.

Finally, the music should autoplay.  There are some tools for doing that.

If you need help with this I can certainly provide that, but my hope is that at least one team member will have these skills and this sort of things is something that each of you should learn, if you don't already know how to do it.