For an good study in designing interesting page (or slide) layouts, look no further than the comics page. The legendary Bill Watterson, the cartoonist behind my favorite comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes, was a master of thinking out side the box…er…cell.
You can see lots more in the archives at Comics.com.
Michael Crichton was and still is one my favorite authors. His books were always interesting to me and I just love the way he tells a story. His books are full of action, usually surrounding humans dealing with technological advances. I haven’t read all of his books because he passwed away in 2008 and I’m kind of pacing myself. I don’t want to run out too soon.
A remarkably large number of Crichton’s books became movies. The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Sphere, Timeline, and Congo, just to name a few. He was also the creator of the long-running hit medical drama, ER. There was always a very visual quality to Crichton’s descriptions. Without becoming overly wordy or descriptive, he could make vivid images appear in my head of what was happening in his books. It almost seemed as if he was trying to write his books in such a way that they would easily lend themselves to cinematic adaptations.
There are a lot of similarities between movies and presentations. Both involve verbal elements, some written but mostly spoken. And both rely heavily on visuals. Even if you’re not using slides in your presentation, the way you look, the way you act and move and behave in front of the audience is a VERY important part of the presentation. Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is a film that started out as a presentation and many of the best presentations I’ve seen involve very cinema-esque visuals.
The lesson I glean from Mr. Crichton’s writing is that any presenter would benefit from a study of cinematic storytelling. Learn to tell your stories through the integration of pictures and sound. You don’t have to incorporate video into your presentations to do this. Plenty of cinematic action can be conveyed “comics-style” through a series of sequential images.
Telling stories through pictures can reinforce the memorability of your presentation, too. Pictures can show children suffering due to lack of water or the happiness associated with a new birth in ways that are nearly impossible to do with words alone. A picture is worth a thousand words, and yet we understand pictures almost instantly. You can get large amounts of information across to your audience very efficiently by relying on visuals.
If you don’t think of yourself as a cinematographer, there’s still hope. There’re plenty of resources out there to help you learn to tell stories visually. Among them are Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, Cinematic Storytelling by Jenniefer van Sijll, and 101 Things I Learned In Film School by Neil Landau. These will get you started, but there are plenty more out there which will benefit you greatly even though you may never actually create a comic book or produce a film.
[image credit: Wikimedia Commons]
I LOVE THIS!!! I think its so cool you're going this route...November 17, 6:33 am by Reagan
