Yeah to achieve that with CSS would take a bit of time to come up with. The Genesis Slider is definitely easier. I don’t know of any plugins that can achieve that.
What if you removed the slider, and added the HTML the slider generates inside of a text widget?
<div id="genesis-responsive-slider">
<div class="flexslider">
<ul class="slides">
<li style="display: list-item;">
<div class="slide-excerpt slide-74708">
<div class="slide-background"></div><!-- end .slide-background -->
<div class="slide-excerpt-border ">
<h2><a href="http://www.seenit.co.uk/video-star-wars-battlefront-bespin-dlc-trailer/" rel="bookmark">Video: Star Wars Battlefront – Bespin DLC trailer</a></h2>
</div><!-- end .slide-excerpt-border -->
</div><!-- end .slide-excerpt -->
<div class="slide-image">
<a href="http://www.seenit.co.uk/video-star-wars-battlefront-bespin-dlc-trailer/" rel="bookmark"><img src="http://i2.wp.com/www.seenit.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/star-wars-batllefront-cloud.jpg?resize=1200%2C600" alt="Video: Star Wars Battlefront – Bespin DLC trailer"></a>
</div><!-- end .slide-image -->
</li>
</ul><!-- end ul.slides -->
</div><!-- end .flexslider -->
</div>
I’d try that and see if it works….it probably won’t if the slider doesn’t load the stylesheet due to it not being active in the slider. If that’s the case, you could always copy the CSS from the plugin and add it in your Theme’s style.css file or a custom file. I assume it should work if you do it that way…..which means you won’t have to use any plugins to achieve this effect.