My Ruby presentation on the road

Hard work, on my Ruby language presentation, last weeks.

First of all, I defined “my actual recipe” to modern presentations.

It is something like using Syd Fields’s 4 acts format and a simplified composition, of Joseph Campbell’s (The hero with a thousand faces), ideas.

Hugh research, lots of sites, documents and videos after, I have a 5 Acts template to my presentation, thanks to Christopher Vogler (The Writer's Journey), proposals.

I think it will be useful to someone else in the future.

With the template done, I fill it with the Ruby language data (that is called “data dump phase”), and after that, start to adapt my presentation to the Lawrence Lessig’s presentation format.

That was a hard work on finding images to express the ideas, since each slide contains just a few words (most of then just one), the number of slides and pictures involved grow up a lot.

Since Lessig’s stile is much like a photomontage movie, that is a consequence.

If you really want to know what I mean, have to see all the material here, and a fresh approach to his ideas here.

Those presentations are most of the time “one way presentations”, the speaker talks and the audience listens to him.

The above Lessig’s sample is a 31’40 minutes presentation with 243 slides…

My case is different, I pretend to interact with the audience (you have to consider, our audience in general is smaller then Lessig’s), I have to convince each one in the audience that he/she is the “hero” on my story. In fact they are part of the story.

If you take the common 1 slide per minute format, you loose a lot on visual impact, and instinctively go to the boring “bullet presentation” format.
On the other hand, if you choose the Lessig’s original format, you loose the audience interaction.

So my choice is: instead of 1 slide per minute format, a sequence of short photomontage movies and interactions per minute, in my mind this way we have the benefits of both patterns.