Pecha Kucha
I’m doing a Pecha Kucha talk on GroundedPower for ITP’s 30th celebration (yay Red!). Pecha Kucha is a presentation format where you have 6 minutes and 40 seconds to show twenty slides. The slides auto advance every twenty seconds. If you fall behind, there’s no going back. For the presentation i’m doing next week, I found out that we’re going to be getting 15 seconds a slide, not 20! I’ve never put one of these together but it has been a really interesting learning experience.
I started out just putting a deck of slides together, keeping it to 20 and cramming as much information as I could in each slide. I did a run through and if a slide took too long, i’d shorten the amount of information on it until it took about the right amount of time. It was still a little frantic but I managed to say everything I wanted to say so I was happy.
Then yesterday, @faludi came by and I did a run through with an audience. From his feedback and suggestions I came to realize that although I was getting all the words I wanted into my deck, I was actually presenting a number of super complicated concepts without the time to provide them with the right context. So although I was finishing in time, I wasn’t being very effective and I was going to make people’s brains hurt.
There isn’t enough time with Pecha Kucha to tell a complicated story. We’re used to a slide having a lot of bullet points, but in fact with Pecha Kucha each slide should have one single, simple idea. The idea can be presented in a timed reveal to help you with pacing.
My new technique is to tell a very simply story with 10 slides instead of 20. Knowing myself and my tendency to cram as much as I can into a slide even when I consciously try not to, making only 10 slides gives me the wiggle room to expand upon each slide with 10 extra slides. Instead of feeling constrained by the format I found the 20 slide format liberating. I can concentrate on telling a simple story really well because there’s no room to do anything else. The power of limitations.
