Working with audio is really fun! This is usually one of the final stages of development where you really start to see your course come to life. Great narration can add context for your learner and can re-enforce the on-screen information by explaining pictures on the slide, rather than just reading the slide text aloud.
While I won’t go much into the benefits and ‘how to’s’ of incorporating audio into your learning modules (and there are stacks!), I’ve come across some simple tips for working with audio in Storyline, that I thought I’d share with you.
First things first, import your audio file into your Storyline project:
The next thing you’ll want to do, is to align some of the elements on your slide to sync with the narration. To do this most effectively, you’ll want to create some cue points on your timeline. Using the timeline preview allows you to see all the objects and animations on your slide, along with hearing the audio playback.
To create cue points during the preview playback, simply press the “C” key on your keyboard. This creates numbered cue points on the timeline.
Don’t worry if you get the timing slightly wrong, you can move the cue points on the timeline until you get them in the right position. You can also position the playhead on the timeline and create a cue point at the playhead, by right-clicking on the timeline / Create cue point at playhead.
You’ll also notice that the right-click allows you to delete all the cue points on a slide, however you can click one at a time, and delete them if they are no longer required.
Now that we have our cue points, we can begin to align our slide elements to appear, disappear or animate in sync with the cue points. Select your first object on the timeline and right-click, then select Align to cue point, and select the cue point you want to align to.
Like magic, your slides will come to life, as if the presenter is creating the animations as they speak!
One final GREAT feature is aligning bullet points to appear in sync with your audio. This was one of those WOW moments for me, are you ready?
When you animate a text box by First Level Paragraph, you get some amazing control over the paragraph animations, and here’s the WOW:
You get a little arrow next to the text box on the timeline, like you do when you have a group of objects. When you click the arrow, each paragraph or bullet appears as a separate line, allowing you to align these to your cue points:
I know right – pretty mind-blowing stuff!
I hope you’ve found these simple audio tips helpful, have fun narrating and animating your modules!