Presentations

I have lots of thoughts about presentations, but most of my experience comes from industry. I was lucky enough to be able to give a couple of presentations at games conferences in Australia, an experience I greatly enjoyed despite having little idea what I was doing :-)

Coming to the ATC course was an opportunity to be a bit more reflective and analytic about presentation skills. Previously I'd typically have just thrown together a few slides in Powerpoint at the last minute, not practice, just wing it when I get up on stage. During my MA I had the pleasure to use Keynote on OSX rather than having to struggle with Powerpoint on Windows.

The first thing I learnt from this course was not to use Powerpoint, although as I said I'd already moved over to Keynote anyway. We had a little fun with this when we were asked to create a 5-10 minute presentation just to try out some of the features of the software. While trying to do this simple piece of work I was struck with how awkward I felt the new version of PP to be, and how lost I felt while trying to use it. This struck a chord with my prior topic for the presentation, the trouble we have getting around campus, finding rooms etc. I decided to combine the two and make a mixture of these sensations of being lost, and use some of the more gratuitous PP features by way of illustration.

Looking back at some of my slides from projects I worked on back then, in hindsight I made excessive use of text on the screen, although I did try to incorporate graphics where appropriate. In fact this worked quite well on one occasion where I wanted to talk about three concepts:

Progress:


Imagination:




Self:



In case you don't get it, that's Will Self.
I couldn't find anything to represent the concept very well, but fortunately one of the audience members recognised Mr Self and laughed.

I also found another presentation I did where I used the same background colour and texture for the first and last slides, but a different one for all of the other slides. Recently I saw a presentation by Rob Clowes where the background colour was related to a theme explicated earlier in his presentation, thus providing some kind of continuity with later slides and also being a visual change to indicate a change in topic for the audience. I used this technique in my presentation for ATC, though I'll have to wait for feedback from my peer reviewers before I find out if they noticed and whether they appreciated it or not.

Other reference points for self-reflection on my learning come from watching other people give presentations. In one session when Geraldine was away, Maria and I offered to coordinate access to video recording equipment for the rest of the group in case they wanted to record themselves presenting. David Hurrion was the only person who took up the option. Even Maria and I were too shy or too lazy to prepare an mock presentation. Watching Dave was interesting, because even with an audience of just two people (and one video camera) he appeared nervous, at least at the start of his talk. After we'd filmed him we watched it back on the television screen. This was an interesting experience, but presumably much more so for Dave. It's clearly an opportunity that I missed out on. Obviously I could have tried filming myself before giving my actual presentation, but I didn't do this either. It would be easy for me to say that I'd do it before any other presentation I give in the future .... but that would just be good intentions. I do think the presentations were recorded on the day I gave mine and I'll try to get hold of that tape to evaluate how well I think I did. Right now I think it was ok, there were some interesting questions at the end so presumably people managed to stay awake through it.

Once I gave a presentation at a games conference in Melbourne. The talk was about writing the software to animate characters on Sony's PlayStation 2 console. There was a representative from Sony in the audience, but he fell asleep during my talk. It was pretty dry, basic for someone like himself, and apparently he'd just got off the plane from France and was hung over.

For the first presentation of my MA I referred to that experience,

"Computer games that I've worked on have been played by literally millions of people, some of whom claim they have been driven to violence as a result. The last presentation I gave was to hundreds of people on a great big stage, but someone fell asleep half way through. Today as there we're in a more intimate environment and there are only three people in the audience I hope my presentation will provoke neither reaction."

haha.

The final point I'd like to make today is to mention how impressed I was with Geoff's presentation delivery. Personally I found the slides less impressive, but in terms of vocal delivery and pacing I thought it was a stand-out presentation. One thing I particularly noticed was his way of projecting towards the back of the room, something he'd mentioned before in a previous seminar. As I sat on the front row for all of the presentations I noticed that some speakers would only make eye contact with those of us immediately in front of them. Geoff pointed out that if you look to the back of the room your head will naturally lift, your chest open, and your voice will carry further. It's a simple technique but one that seemed to work well, even in a presentation where there were only two rows in the audience. It'll be interesting to review the presentations on film as the video camera was behind the audience and I'd expect this technique pays off in terms of audio recording quality.
Definitely something I'll try to use in future presentations.