You know what it's like. You just get the RFP at O' dark thirty and in a mad dash you need it to look like the savior! Well making new business presentations is a fine art. Done well by many and mastered by none. The rules of the game change so frequently that boilerplate PPT templates look like what they are – dated. What can you do to soak your pitch in gas and give the potential client the lighter? Visuals. And the ability to pitch but that's not important right now ;)

But I need to pitch this by EOD tomorrow!

Here's a quick way to cut a capabilities reel in short order. I've used an application called "Prezi." Don't let the silly name fool you it's really a nice browser-based presentation application. There's a desktop application for development as well built in Adobe Air (I think). Now the short comings of Prezi is the look is a bit of a one-trick-pony. Mind you for pitches it's fast and elegant and you'll get more time to polish everything if you get 'short-rounded' at a later date.

Here's a interactive reel I assembled in about a day:

There's a couple of tricks to know about what you just saw:

1. Build the animation out fully as a static linear transition.
2. The key to the animations is to grab your screen shots with an application like Snapz Pro to show the navigation and any robust animations or features.
3. Then in a video edit application like Final Cut Pro, adjust speeds, layer music and drop in the above mentioned animations of the screengrabs.
4. If you're a MAC user I always recommend using Keynote over PowerPoint as I feel it handles video much cleaner and without prejudice.
5. Now export and add it to your presentation for maximum impact.

Hope this helps your bag the big one, or at least keep you in the fight!