Presentations are nothing like movies. You can go to the movies and sit there for two hours giving your full, undivided attention. But have you ever been able to sit through a two hour presentation without wanting to rip your hair out? Usually not 10 minutes go by without people starting to tweet or answer emails.

There are many lessons to be learned from the film industry on how we present the information in our presentations to make it more interesting to the audience; much of it has to do with storytelling. But probably the most important thing to realize is that, no matter how brilliantly you tell your story, or how good you are at creating anticipation and mystery around your content, a presentation can never hold a lot of information and remain interesting.

When we start preparing our presentation there is much research that has to be done. Whether it’s because your boss asked you to present the company’s new product or because you’re giving a talk about your industry at an event, you never want to look foolish in front of the audience. After all the research is done we have a huge problem selecting what pieces of information are the most relevant. This usually leads people to not want to choose what makes and doesn’t make the cut and pack all the info on to their slides.

I’ve talked about this before, these type of slides are not really slides, they are documents, what is known as a slideument. When you have a large collection of information, its place is a document, not a presentation. This document is like a movie, it holds all the information, and is something you can refer to during your presentation and hand out at the end, or even just send a link to an online version to be more environmentally conscious.

So if the document with all the research, findings, opinions and information is the movie, what is your presentation? Your presentation is the trailer for your content. Trailers are short, they choose the most interesting parts of movies and leave some questions unanswered, as a result, they make almost any movie seem interesting. If you choose the most relevant and interesting parts of the information you are going to present wisely, you can make almost any audience fall in love with your content.

 

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

 

Related posts:

1. Presentation Lesson from the Dark Side
2. How to give an interesting presentation
3. When not to do a presentation
4. Storytelling to make your presentations memorable: Rebirth