More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sometimes a motif is straightforward, and other times it will be clever, humorous, or surprising. The deeper and more broadly your simple motif extends through the presentation, the more cohesive and elegant the communication.
Never rush through the process of writing your Act I headlines—the words that you write in Act I will make the difference between a strong start and a weak one. It’s not uncommon for an individual or a team to completely revise Act I several times until the story is exactly right for the audience.
The Setting Headline Where am I, and when is it? The Role Headline Who am I in this setting? The Point A Headline What challenge do I face in this setting? The Point B Headline Where do I want to be? (The gap between the Point A and B headlines) Why am I here? The Call to Action Headline How do I get from A to B?
REMEMBER Your Act I headlines make an emotional connection with your audience.
When you begin writing the Act II headlines in Chapter 5, you’ll find that these Act I headlines have set up your story in a way that will limit the quantity of information to only what is necessary and the quality of information to the high standards you expect.
BBP CHECKLIST: PLANNING YOUR FIRST FIVE SLIDES Do the first five slides of your presentation accomplish the following: Orient your audience to the setting of the presentation? Interest them by acknowledging their role in the setting? Engage them emotionally by describing a challenge they face (Point A)? Motivate them by affirming what they want (Point B)? Focus them by offering a way to get from Point A to Point B (Call to Action)?
Estos libros hay que buscaron y leerlos
Act I headlines, including Robert McKee’s Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (Regan Books, 1997); Syd Field’s Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (Dell, 1984); and James Bonnet’s Stealing Fire from the Gods: The Complete Guide to Story for Writers and Filmmakers (Michael Wiese
If you don’t tailor your presentations to your audiences, you won’t connect with them.
One way to plan for these different situations is to create several versions of Act I, each of which is tailored to a specific audience. Create a copy of the document that contains the five Act I headlines from your current story template. In the new document, revise the Point A and Point B headlines, which describe the central problem that your new audience faces. When you change these headlines to reflect a new problem, you might find that you need to revise the Setting
Ask your group questions like these: What do we know about this person? What have we heard about his personality type? How does she make decisions? What can we learn from a Web search about his thinking process? What can we learn from our social network about how she works with other people? How do we effectively fashion an experience that aligns with his interests and personality type?
Use a digital scanner to insert pictures of documents, a pen tablet to make sketches, a video camera to insert video clips, and a microphone to collect sound.
Act II in the story template contains three columns, labeled Key Point, Explanation, and Detail, as shown in Figure 5-2. In the Key Point column, you give the top three reasons your audience should accept your Call to Action headline. The Explanation column contains an additional level of information about the Key Point column headlines, and the Detail column contains the next level of information about the Explanation column headlines.
The entire story template, including Act I and all three columns in Act II, contains 44 cells, each of which contains a single headline. If you spend an average of one minute per headline, you have enough material for a 45-minute presentation. If you skip the Detail column, you end up with a total of 17 headlines in your story template; if you spend an average of 50 seconds on each, you have enough material for a 15-minute presentation. If you skip the Explanation and Detail columns, you have 8 headlines; if you spend an average of 40 seconds on each, you have a 5-minute presentation.
Tip An easy way to remember the essence of Act II is to imagine the audience saying to you as you decide what to keep in your presentation, “1-2-3, show me only what I need to see.”
Now that your audience knows your recommended Call to Action headline, they’re eager to hear why and how it is a good idea, which is what you’ll justify next. Focusing exclusively on explaining your Call to Action headline in Act II gives you the criteria you need to reduce the amount of information in your presentation. You’ll include only information that supports your reasons for recommending the Call to Action headline and exclude everything else.
you begin Act II, your first goal is to write the headlines for the most important slides you will present. If your audience will remember only three key points in your presentation, you need to know specifically where those corresponding slides are in your presentation and allow ample time to show them and speak about them.
Explanation headline and cite specific evidence that backs it up, as shown in Figure 5-16. This is where you include quantitative information, case studies, charts, graphs, anecdotes, analysis, and any other details that support the Explanation headline in the column to the left.
but you might find that you don’t have exactly three supporting headlines to write at any level in the template. If you want to use only two headlines, simply leave the third cell blank.
Do the rest of your headlines in Act II accomplish the following: Justify your Call to Action headline with your key points? Clarify your Key Point headlines with further explanation? Back up your Explanation headlines with the appropriate detail? Put your ideas in a logical sequence and priority? Integrate your motif verbally through your headlines?
Now that you’ve completed the story template, you have accomplished what you set out to do at the start of the chapter—that is, prioritizing your ideas and finding the right sequence in which to present them.
As described earlier, writing your slide headlines using the Act II columns has now given your presentation an important scalability that will play out when you work in PowerPoint. When you create a presentation with three columns, you are prioritizing your ideas in order of importance, from left to right. If you have a 45-minute presentation, you’ll present all your slides in Act II. If your time is unexpectedly cut to 15 minutes, you’ll skip the Detail slides, and if your time is cut to 5 minutes, you’ll also skip the Explanation slides. Because you have applied the power of a hierarchy to
...more
Esto es un concepto importantantisimo que permite major compression
If you get the headlines right, they will clarify and expand understanding; but if you get them wrong, you will lead your audience in the wrong direction, in a fruitless, frustrating waste of time. That’s why it’s important to spend as much time as possible editing, tightening, and clarifying your words.
Don’t move forward from this stage of the process until you finalize your story template and get agreement from everyone who has a stake in your presentation.
Brainstorming is the art of generating ideas for a particular purpose; it supports an environment of free-flowing thinking without constraints. Presentation development is the art of selecting and prioritizing ideas; it calls on a different set of skills, including critical thinking, selection, prioritization, and reasoning.
There are many reasons why the ancient concept of hierarchy still holds such power today. Some researchers believe that the mind uses hierarchical structures to store information in and retrieve information from long-term memory. For example, the idea of chunking is based on the idea that long-term memory applies a higher category to smaller pieces in working memory to bring them together and make them easier to handle. Some experts believe that a part of the brain called the neocortex retrieves information in a hierarchical way. And certainly the organizational technique of hierarchy is fully
...more
Esto es muy importante. usarlo con frecuencia
Transform your script into a storyboard with preliminary backgrounds. Write out the words you’ll speak during the presentation. Review the three ground rules for storyboarding.
But first, take a tour of your new storyboard. If there are any blank slides in the presentation without headlines, delete them. At the lower right of the PowerPoint window on the status bar is a View toolbar with three buttons—when you click them from left to right, you will see the storyboard in Normal, Slide Sorter, and Slide
Show views. Click and drag the handle on the Zoom toolbar to the left to decrease magnification of your current view and to the right to increase magnification. The indicator to the left of the Zoom toolbar displays the exact percentage of magnification—click this value to open the Zoom dialog box and make more precise adjustments.
Practicing Scaling to Time As you saw in Chapter 5, if you complete all three columns of Act II, you have enough Key Point, Explanation, and Detail slides to fill about a 45-minute presentation. However, at the last minute, you might need to scale down your presentation from 45 minutes to 15 or even 5 minutes. Now practice how easy it is to do that with only a few clicks of the mouse. Follow these steps in Slide Sorter view to scale the storyboard to time by hiding the slides you don’t need to use in the presentation: If you’re giving a 45-minute presentation, do nothing—all your slides will
...more
only the Act I, Key Point, and Explanation slides will appear when you give the presentation; the Detail slides will be hidden. View the result by pressing the F5 key to start the slide show from the first slide. Press the Esc key to return to Slide Sorter view. To prepare a 5-minute presentation, complete the tasks for a 15-minute presentation, but in addition to selecting the white Detail slides, select the light gray Explanation slides, and then right-click any Explanation or Detail slide and select Hide Slide. Now only the Act I and Key Point slides will appear during the presentation; the
...more
create a coherent presentation, you need to plan not only each slide but also the words you speak while you project the slide on a screen. Your primary objective in writing out your narration is to seamlessly integrate the soundtrack of your voice with the visual track of your slides so that you avoid splitting the
attention of your audience between the two.
The headline of the slide does double duty in Notes Page view—not only does it summarize the main idea that will appear on screen during the presentation, but it also summarizes the meaning of the entire notes page. If you’re used to having a great deal of written information on screen, writing out your verbal explanation in the notes area gives you confidence that you will cover the bulk of the information through the verbal channel, which in turn gives you the freedom to keep the visual channel simple, focused, and to the point.
For now, spell out as much of your explanation as possible at this stage of the presentation—if you’re pressed for time, write what you have at this point and then expand on your text in more detail later. Or use a digital recorder or smart phone to capture your thoughts as you’re speaking about each slide and then transcribe the recording later and paste the text passages into the corresponding notes areas.
Rule 1: Be Visually Concise, Clear, Direct, and Specific
When you sketch your storyboard, use the simplest illustration possible without any excess detail. Not only does a simple illustration help you make your visual point quickly, it also will guide you to avoid the extraneous detail that would otherwise clog the eye of the needle of working memory of your audience.
Consistency Within Columns and Variety Across Columns
And then you’ll sketch the third-most important Detail slides, which the audience might not remember—here you’ll include graphs, charts, screen captures, and other visual elements.
sketching process
Explanation slide and follow the idea with its three Detail slides. This back-and-forth technique is helpful to your audience because with the first Explanation slide, you summarize what you are about to tell them, and then with the Detail slides, you do the actual telling. As you write out the narration in the notes area on the Explanation slides, you likewise should summarize the Detail slides to follow. Think of the slides as cognitive stepping stones that are guiding and supporting the working memory of the audience along their path of understanding.
Rule 3: Sketch Outside the Screen Too
will probably add graphics to most of these slides to illustrate the headlines, but you don’t have to limit yourself to showing information on a slide exclusively with a graphic; you have many other media tools and techniques at your disposal. For example, use a physical prop that you hold in your hands or pass around to audience members to communicate an
Explanation slide, as shown in Figure 6-14. You might switch to a different software application on your desktop to communicate the headlines across three Detail slides. Or you might use a brief video clip to illustrate each of your three Key Point slides.
Ground Rule 1. Be visually concise, clear, direct, and specific. Ground Rule 2. In Act II, sketch consistency within columns and variety across columns. Ground Rule 3. Sketch outside the screen too.
Does your storyboard: Include backgrounds that cue the Key Point, Explanation, and Detail slides? Provide you with the ability to quickly scale your presentation up and down to time? Contain notes in the notes area of what you’ll say during each slide?
Tip 3: Install the Storyboard Formatter on Your
To make the BBP Storyboard Formatter available on your local computer every time you create a new PowerPoint file, save it in your PowerPoint Templates folder by following these steps: Double-click to open the BBP Storyboard Formatter that you saved to your computer earlier in this chapter. Click File, Save As, and then in the Save As dialog box, click the Save As Type drop-down arrow, and choose PowerPoint Template. PowerPoint automatically selects the location on your local computer where the default PowerPoint template is stored. To create a new presentation, click File, New, and then My
...more
