Brightpage and Image Slider

I desperately need help with the website I am currently designing for a group. We have chosen the Brightpage theme, but the included image slider (nivo slider) only takes images from featured posts, whereas the style we need is more like that of EasySlider, where you can create custom posts from another option on the left hand side of the wordpress dashboard, as ours will be working more like a website than a blog.
I have therefore tried to change the nivo slider which was coded into the theme to EasySlider… but I cannot get it to work! I am at the point of tearing my hair out, it is driving me up the wall and I depserately need to get this done by Sunday!
I have tried a number of things so far – I have tried installing EasySlider as a plugin, but this will not work at all.
I tried changing the coding for the current slider for the coding for EasySlider (including adding the corresponding functions to the functions.php file and the correct .js)
This is a bit closer, but I cannot get the images to display at all, I get a grey box with the title – no images.
I’m at a complete loss for what to do – as you can probably guess, I don’t particularly know what I’m doing, it’s all trial and error!

Many Thanks in advance for your help,

Rachel