Presentation Design: You Are Not Stephen Spielberg - TJ Walker Video
How many times have you spent hours preparing a PowerPoint presentation, making it look a million dollars, only for the audience to miss the point entirely? In today's video speaking expert TJ Walker reminds you of an important fact:
You are not Stephen Spielberg, and however many hours you spend adding fancy animations, and 'breathtaking transitions' you can be sure of two things:
Audiences are extremely visually literate and have very high expectations of what is going to 'wow' them up on screen. Hollywood has millions of dollars to throw at the screen to make sure that they create knock out visuals. You have PowerPoint. Think about it.
Even if you do manage to create arresting visuals in your presentation, are they going to be reinforcing your message or distracting your audience?
TJ Walker asks:
''It seems easy, it seems simple. The next thing you know, you've spent twelve hours tweaking this little bird flying through your PowerPoint to put an emphasis on something.
And do you know what? No one remembers what the emphasis was. They come up to you afterward saying 'how did you get that little bird to flutter through your PowerPoint presentation?
They're missing your message!
''
In the following video, taken from the TJ Walker's excellent SpeakCast website you'll find out other reasons besides that you shouldn't waste those precious twelve hours you might otherwise spend adding birds and flowers to your slides.
Besides the fact that you can't compete with Hollywood and the very real danger of distracting your audience from what you are up there saying in the first place, there is one other factor that you need to consider. TJ Walker notes that:
''There's the chance that technology can overwhelm your message. It certainly can overwhelm your time.
Your rehearsal time is what I'm more interested in. The people who spend the most time on the production values and the video and all that, they're always the first ones to tell me 'TJ, I didn't have any time to rehearse.'
You did have time to rehearse. You didn't use it properly. Because you were wasting your time on these other things that ultimately aren't about a speech.
''
So next time you're working into the night to make your presentation look pretty, step back and think about what you are trying to achieve as a communicator. As a parting shot, TJ Walker adds:
''If you are there, and it's live, and there are people in front of you, focus your energies on being interesting.''
Well rehearsed, arresting speech will beat twirling animations and dancing text any day of the week.
posted by
Michael Pick
on Tuesday, December 12 2006
Tuesday, January 15 2008
URL of this article:
http://masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com/2006/12/12/presentation_design_you_are_not.htm
