Writewell: Ever Evolving

We're still in let's-put-on-a-show-in-the-barn mode here, so all the feedback is great. The ad was half a joke–we're kind of liking a Victorian vibe for the design as a whole but the rest was in-joke snark–but all the comments were right to the point and very helpful. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, I've been trying to figure out how to make my lectures worth $10. That still seems like a lot of money to me for a forty-five minute slide show (with the audio track also available alone), so the workbook is going to have to really helpful. I do think the content is excellent, it's just forty-five minutes is not much time, and if you try to give people too much to learn at once, nobody learns anything. So synthesizing content down, making it clear, and then figuring out how to apply it in workbook pages . . . that's what I'm working on now. I did start working in Photoshop finally and I'm experimenting with animation in Keynote because a lot of people remember visuals better than they do words, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is to learn a new skill. And I'm looking for vintage images now that I can use to make concepts clear. Like the ad yesterday, a lot of it is just me having fun with new toys, but I did an animation to demonstrate the idea of structure. and I kind of want the final slide of the sequence on a T-shirt. Not sure it makes sense without the narration, but here's Morrie, the Plot Moose:

I may have been a junior high teacher for too long. I'm big on colorful and moving.

So here's my question for the day. These lectures are going to be a filmed slideshow with narration. A basic PowerPoint presentation (except we use Keynote, of course) with voiceover that plays like a movie. In your experience with this kind of presentation (yes, I know 95% of slide presentations suck, we're trying for the other 5%), what works? What doesn't? What would you like to see? What should be avoided at all costs?

Because otherwise, you're gonna get a lot of stuff like Morrie.