Presentations: How Not to Bore People to Death
I love presentations!
As long as I don't have to deliver them.
Delivering presentations or pitches myself, is dreadful, and something that I need to learn quickly if I want to survive within the industry. I get way too nervous, I end up boring people, or I forget entire chunks of what I wanted to say, even though I prepared them well in advance and repeated them endlessly in front of mirrors or imagined audiences.
However, there are masses of online presentations, TED talks, and the like, where the topic is interesting and the speaker is literate, confident, and maybe even a bit funny. And while - as we all certainly have experienced at least once in our lives - not all presentations can be fun, there are certainly tips, tricks and workarounds to avoid being the boring speaker.
One of them are Pecha Kuchas. (1)
These are short presentations that have to follow certain ramifications: You may not use more than 20 slides. Each slide needs to show what you are talking about and needs to fit your subject. No slide may be longer than 20 seconds. This means, that your presentation amounts to a max. of 6 minutes and 20 seconds. This makes for a concise, succinct, and quick way of delivering ideas and knowledge.
And for a hell of a lot of stress, if you listen closely into a couple of them.
So in yesterday's session of Professional Studies, this was the blueprint onto which we should model our own little presentations. For we are set about to present the subject of our industry report in that style. The only difference to the Pecha Kucha 20x20-system is the fact that we use our own modified form that is 10x20 - 10 slides à 20 seconds, aka 3min 10 sec of presentation time.
Which sounds much more doable than an entire presentation. But it is still exciting since it requires me to measure my rate of speaking, possibly adapt to it, and to get a feeling of how much information I can safely provide within one slide.
For my industry report, I decided that I want to look into the gender roles and gender troubles within cinematography. I got the idea a couple of sessions ago when our module talked about the diverse film production unions in the UK and we searched online for a cinematographer's guild or union. When we looked into the member's list of The British Society of Cinematographers I immediately realised that there were no female cinematographers featured initially. (2)
At my request, we looked around a bit online and indeed found few female cinematographers I unfortunately never heard of. I was baffled by that, and decided that I want to look deeper into the matter.
Delving deeper into research, I was shocked to realise that the percentage of female cinematographers working internationally were only at about 2-6% at the most. (3) This is an appalling number - even in regard to the still rather misogynistic industry and the gender imbalance.
But why is it that extreme?
This is definitely an interesting circumstance that needs to be taken up. I feel that I need to take it up, especially since I decided to further explore my career opportunities in that direction. I feel that I need to know what may lie ahead of me. Which is why I need to know what possibilities the industry offers, whether this is - again - a symptom of a systemic problem, or whether there are possibilities for improvement.
I need to know what I am up against.
But first, I need to master the art of a mini Pecha Kucha, and get my facts together in a presentable way. And beat my fear for presentation delivery.
References:
(1) Pecha Kucha 20 Images x 20 Seconds [online] http://www.pechakucha.org [Accessed on 7 December 2017]
(2) The British Society of Cinematographers (n.d) BSC Members [online] https://bscine.com [Accessed on 7 December 2017]
(3) Smith, S. (2017) Inequality in 900 popular films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT, and Disability from 2007 - 2016 [online] https://bit.ly/2C1GfQX [Accessed on 7 December 2017]
Reed Morano [online] Image taken from: https://bit.ly/2GjwkLk [Accessed on 7 December 2017]