Presentations in Action - Jerry Weissman [59]
Video and cinema directors incorporate this dynamic in how they direct their subjects and cameras. Watch a well-directed television drama or film and notice how the characters move across the screen. Most often, the sympathetic characters, the heroes and heroines, move from the left side of the screen toward the right, flowing with the natural movement of the eyes. By contrast, the unsympathetic characters, the villains, move from right to left, fighting the eyes’ natural flow.
All these dynamics add up to a significant factor in presentations, with particular regard to the position, movement, and direction of all matters visual. This includes the design and animation of your graphics, and even the positioning of the physical elements of your presentation—as well as you. Whenever you present, put the projection screen to your left as you face the audience:
Figure 78.1. The projection screen should be to your left.
In this arrangement, every time you click to a new slide, the eyes of your audience will travel from you to the screen and across the image easily and naturally. This is especially important with text slides, so that the audience takes in the words on the screen just as they do in a book. If the screen were on the opposite side, the eyes of your audience would have to go backward, against the grain, before returning to take in the words on a second pass.
This same dynamic is applicable to how you animate your slides. Make the default entry movement of all your graphics from left to right, unless you want to send a negative or different message.
You, your slides, and the screen are all subject to these deeply embedded instinctive and learned forces acting upon your audience. When you step up to the front of the room, be sure you make the right choices.
79. Graphics Synchronization: The Missing Link
Mark Twain’s nineteenth-century adage, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” is applicable to twenty-first-century presentations. In business today, everybody talks about Microsoft PowerPoint, the medium of choice for presentations. Most of the talk is about design; how to avoid making a visual hindrance of what is supposed to be a visual aid; and how to avoid the all-too-common “Death by PowerPoint.” Multiple Amazon listings, abundant bookstore shelves, countless web sites, and numerous state-of-the-art graphics studios are all bursting at the seams with advice on how to design slides for presentations.
Yet nobody is doing anything about the other vital element meant to complement the graphics: the presenter. Oh, yes, advice about body language abounds, but there’s nothing about how to integrate body language with the slides and the narrative.
This missing link creates a distraction during presentations that is as disconcerting as watching a film with an out-of-sync soundtrack. The movie audience, irritated by even the slightest mismatch of picture and sound, is likely to call out to the projectionist or even to ask for a refund. The business audience, struggling to relate what they are seeing with what the presenter is saying, is likely to interrupt or simply tune out, rejecting both the presenter and the message.
Such negative reactions occur because asynchronous sights and sounds challenge the sensitive neurology of the human perception system. Audiences find it difficult to process multiple sensory inputs, a difficulty compounded when the images are in motion—thus the irritation caused by the slipped soundtrack.
The equivalent of motion in presentations is the animation feature in PowerPoint. We’ve all been victimized by the flying bullets and spinning pie charts that tumble helter-skelter onto the projection screen like circus acrobats. In Chapter 38, “Computer Animation,” you read how