4 minutes is a very little time: preparing my Siggraph 2007 fast-forward-style presentation
Let's see if I can update this blog in 4 minutes 8)
Yesterday and today I finally prepared my presentation for my company about Siggraph 2007.
The presentation itself is divided in 3 groups. Every group has a different approach. For my group we decided to do 4 (all members excluding one that is on holiday) quick presentations of 5 minutes each.
Well it's actually 4 minutes as 1 minutes is needed at the very least to change places and load up the PowerPoint slides.
I did my 6 slides in English and then planned to present them in Japanese, but I was definitely being way too optimistic.
So tonight at home I did a few trials and quickly decided to go for English. Not many people will understand me but I'll be a lot like being at Siggraph itself 8)
My first attempt in English took me 12 minutes. Now I'm down to 5'30"... one and a half minutes off ! I do the team greetings and introduction in Japanese and that alone takes me about 40 seconds.. bare minimum to avoid being rude 8)
I came a long way from 12 minutes.. and I dunno if I can talk any faster in English or any other language !
It's a pain to present, but also an interesting experience. It's the first time that I do a timed presentation and I'm learning a lot about reharsing, squeezing informations avoiding pauses, getting straight to the point.
Interesting, but it would be also interesting to sleep as it's 4:28 AM already !
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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Cool! Last time I did a
Cool! Last time I did a timed presentation in English was last April in Lisbon and indeed I had to reharse it but not really go crazy over squeezing it since I had a good 20 minutes (which became almost 1 hour after the Q&A session!)
I tried to squeeze in something funny to keep the audience interested every now and then, but otherwise I don't have much more experience or valuable tips.. just reharse!
Ah, and I also found out previously that talking fast is bad! Say less but do it slowly!
At least in my experience of course... moo!
I talk fast, I act fast
"..so please, pretty please, with sugar on top.... clean the fucking car !" (..anybody can guess the citation ? 8)
I ended up talking very fast. Impressive what rehearsing can do 8)
I also had some extra weight as I was responsible for the 3 other speakers in my Siggraph's group.
I pressured them a lot for time but in the end other groups took more extra time than us 8P
I took many pics, but I'm not sure if I can publish them... oopss I forgot my camera at work !
Mr Wolf from Pulp Fiction.
Mr Wolf from Pulp Fiction.
Right ! A non-BS figure (I
Right ! A non-BS figure (I suppose).
Anyhow, what's with my English recently ? I wrote "the sugar" instead of "sugar".
Is the Italian influence striking back or is the Japanese influence kicking in ?
ummmmmm
I think it was 'cherry on
I think it was 'cherry on top' anyway =)
Sugar and cherries
It's actually "sugar on top", check the last 10 seconds: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANPsHKpti48
iPresentation !!!
The thing about presentation is to have good slides. A set of slides should cover all the aspects of what you want to say and what you say is just to give an idea what you are talking about. Slides also must be self explanatory and need to avoid saying general and obvious things.
Then the presentation can be short, copies of slides distributed to the audience and everyone is happy because everyone gets the knowledge and avoid sleeping on empty wording of the presenter.
A perfect situation is when you just can take slides and avoid presentation at all and still get the whole point.
Unfortunately most people just give kind of basic information on the slides and use it as general agenda for their speech.
iDirectorator has spoken
iDirectorator has spoken !!!
Hints from the pros ! 8)
Actually once we had a course on making effective presentations from one of the big guys in the company.
However it was all in Japanese and honestly I didn't understand much of it... as usual, one thing is talking to a chick, another is talking about abstract concepts.
Wow, you're brave... I could
Wow, you're brave... I could never give any kind of presentation where I had to speak much... I'm more the diagrms kind of presenter... Introduce, point at pictures and run away before anyone asks anything... :)
Well it was non-technical,
Well it was non-technical, so it would have been hard to get away with diagrams 8)
Though recently I'm starting to think that one could communicate more efficiently in a hierarchical list format rather than writing things down in phrases and paragraphs.
Ah, no diagrams, fair
Ah, no diagrams, fair enough..
That hierarchical list format does seem an interesting way of doing things... I wonder if it would work for documentation of applications... I'll have to try it next time I finish up a project for work.
But as a kind of simple hand-out I can see it working very well..
Hierarchical list format is
Hierarchical list format is actually what comes natural from wikis.
To take notes at conferences I use TiddlyWiki because it's fast.. but I realized that I don't really need many features. It's mostly a few headings and then a list.. comes easy because in most wiki markup languages a list element is simply an asterisk
!!title
* rap mf
** yoyoyo
* food chicken
* yeah !
TiddlyWiki...
TiddlyWiki, That sounds like it could be useful for doing that!
I wonder if there's an app that would do that kind of thing on a smart phone.. (I have the Nokia E90)
If there isn't, I guess I'll have to write a simple little app that can do that... Shouldn't be too much work (Until it comes to adding "improvements")
So bottom line... You are
So bottom line...
You are compressing 12 minutes worth of information into 4 minutes, in a language that most of your audience will not understand anyway. sounds very useful!!!
Compressor :)
He studied all compression algorithms for iRemoteDesktop, so now he could send his speech through it :)
FF MF
It was a very generic presentation about what I liked and what I didn't like at Siggraph.
Also there was this excuse of giving a Siggraph's fast forward paper presentation-like ..but most importantly, I didn't want to spend much time after this thing, because I'm still a coder ! 8P