Freaky People Productions

If you’ve sat through many Powerpoint presentations recently, you’ll have noticed they are more multimedia than ever before. Embedded movies, youtube links, audio files… they can liven up a presentation, but also require more preparation for both the presenter and the technician.

I strongly recommend to event and conference managers to provide an audio connection for all laptops, and ensure the show computers have been tested with multimedia. Whether you’ve offered it or not, presenters today assume that they can walk in with a flash drive full of video clips, audio files and external web links.

How do you properly prepare for this? Read on for common pitfalls and manageable solutions.

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Reading the ten typographic mistakes everyone makes at Christopher Phin’s Receding Hairline blog, brought back vivid — and occasionally painful — memories of editing copy at my University paper. In particular the vicious division in the comments to the article, between those urging Christopher to both keep up the fight, and to “get a life”.

See, the thing is that people who gravitate to jobs like editing copy or designing layouts at a weekly paper, working for peanuts — Joey’s pizza, actually — is that we’re obviously anal-retentive and naturally procedural. Read the rest of this entry »

An insightful overview of teleprompter tips, sightings during the US presidential primaries can be seen here, at Garr Reynold’s site, Presentation Zen.

Teleprompters allow for speakers to present without the apparent use of notes. Keep in mind however, that there is a learning curve, and without preparation can appear to be more stilted or wooden than reading from visible notes. The teleprompter operator listens to the presenter and adjusts the speed of the words so they flow naturally. Additionally, this allows the presenter to ad-lib, or go off-script, without worrying about the script running away from them.