I know it makes me weird, but I particularly enjoy it when film producers take the time and spend the money to make their title sequences interesting. It’s like an added bonus if the opening and closing credits are fun to watch. Credit sequences have the tall order of conveying a lot of tedious information in a way that keeps your attention, so in many ways, they can teach us something about presenting.

Below are some of my favorite title sequences, and a word or two about what lessons we might learn from them about presentation design.

All of the images below are taken from the terrific site, The Art of the Title Sequence. Click on any of the images to visit the site,read more about the sequences, and even watch some of them.

Stranger Than Fiction

Aside from this being one of my all-time favorite movies, I also love both the beginning and ending titles. The first shows us how Harold, a depressed IRS agent, views the world: primarily in numbers. The later is a whimsical sort of photo developer’s lightbox of images from the film. The two together subtly illustrate the transformation of Harold’s life from one of cold, lifeless counting to one filled with emotion, color, and art. You can use a similar change in the look of your slides to physically illustrate the change you want the audience to make over the course of your presentation.

Wall-E

I love Pixar for many reasons, but one of them is certainly their love and devotion to good credit sequences. From the “outtakes” they created for Toy Story 2, to the beautiful, painted vignettes from Ratatouille, they always manage to make their credits something special. But of all of them, I think Wall-E is my favorite. The visuals actually continue the story of the movie, telling what happens to the human race after they return to earth. Aside from just showing us how beautiful visual aids can be, you can see how slides could actually be like comics that advance the “story” of the presentation. You don’t want them to tell the story completely on their own and eliminate the need for a presenter, but sometimes you can make a point more profoundly by showing rather than telling.

Monty Python and The Holy Grail

The ultimate in low-budget title sequences, the beginning of this film should teach us that you don’t need big budgets to achieve an entertaining (and memorable) effect.

The Untouchables

The concept here is very simple. The camera simply pans past the shadows cast by the letters of the film’s title. We don’t realize what we’re seeing for several minutes, but it’s entertaining nonetheless. A similar effect can be found in the beginning of Tim Burton’s Batman, in which the camera moves around and through a carving of the Bat-symbol. The concept here for presenting is to make each slide part of a larger whole picture, as in this presentation by Duarte, or perhaps using a tool like Prezi.

Catch Me If You Can & The Incredibles

Both of these illustrate just how much can be done using simple shapes, vibrant colors, and typography. Try experimenting with combining shapes in PowerPoint or Keynote to achieve similar effects.

There are, of course, tons of other great title sequences. These are just a few. What are some of your favorites and what kind of ideas do they inspire in you?

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.

Michael’s lesson in a (few) word(s): Cinematic Storytelling.

This the fifth and final post in a series I’m calling “Build Slides Like…” in which I’ve shared a new idea about presenting taken from an inspiring creative type (non-presenter) each day. Others I blogged about were Duff Goldman, Dave Ramsey, and Mike Holmes. and Jillian Michaels. If you’ve enjoyed these posts, please consider subscribing to this blog via RSS or email so you won’t miss any future presentation tips and advice.

[image credit: Wikimedia Commons]