Inspired by some colleagues, I have started thinking about how to get my ideas and thoughts into a more interesting format than the traditional text and pictures. The goal is looking for a higher volume audience than the traditional presentation with the advantages of asynchronous communication.

So I have started rethinking some of my more repeated presentations. I have started by breaking them up into a series of 5-15 minute "slide casts".

I have created three so far and these are the lessons learned;

1. Collecting the tools required to deliver a reasonable quality result
2. No matter how accomplished a presenter, its hard to get the visuals and the audio track "just right" to feel comfortable to publish (probably more so if you are a good presenter)

Tools

It took me a while to find some tools. The editing suite was the challenge. What I have for the moment is;

Star Office - generate the slides and export to JPG

Audactity - record and edit the audio track, export as WAV

Ulead Studio - import the JPG's and WAV, sync the graphics to the audio, export to WMV in 640x480 res, 4:3 aspect at 5 fps using the Ulead Best Quality codec

I will catalog more details on this in a future post.

Content

There will be a heap of future posts on this topic. I am sure its a journey similar to normal presentation skills. What I have tried so far is;

General

Its hard to make something over 10 minutes interesting

Effort gets exponentially larger the longer the preso

Images

Create half the slides you think you need for 5-10 minutes and then half again. Save yourself some editing time.

The "Lessig" method of putting a few words on each slide can be visually impactful for a few slides, can get a bit boring after 10, when you cannot see the presenter.

For complex slides, build you slides bit by bit to keep it interesting.

Audio

Content comfort and preparation are directly linked. If you have not presented exactly the same content numerous times, then you need to practice, practice, practice.

Record you practices. Its fine to practice in the car or alone, but the best thing is to hear your recorded voice. Hear your funny quirks or commonly repeated phrases that make the voice track weird

An idea I plan on trying next is to only have 1 slide as the starting point. An image with no words. Then record an audio track explaining it as I would normally. Then I will build a presentation which best communicates my words. Will let you know how it goes..

Look for more from me..