In my first post about Prepping for Prezi Day I showed you where the best starting point is for building a great Prezi, and explained that Mind-Mapping is a great technique to help you plan. Now it’s time to take things a step further as I show you how I prepare my content for Octobers Prezi Day presentation.
What’s your story?
Most people who build presentations forget that they are actually (or should be) telling a story. I like to think of business presentations as just story’s for grown ups. Even though we are all very mature professional people (myself excluded) we do still love a good story. It’s why we spend Billions on movies and cinema tickets every year. We love to be engaged with a story, and have done so since the stone age. This is something that in my opinion will never change for human beings. But the way in which we tell our stories will get more and more advanced………Prezi, 3D movies, Holographics, and so on. This is extremely exciting, BUT no matter how advanced things get there will always need to be a good written story behind everything.
Remember ‘Content is and always will be king’.
A recap of step 1
If you followed my first article you now know that Mind-Mapping is a really useful technique for planning your Prezi. In step 1 of building my Prezi for Prezi Day Europe I created the below Mind-Map as a way of helping me understand what content I needed to talk about in my presentation.
What I found from that Mind-Map was that my subject ‘Death by Prezi – And how to avoid it’ can actually be closely linked to the job of a Pilot. If someone flying a plane spins and rolls the plane out of control then their audience will feel really sick…….just like the motion sickness you feel when Death by Prezi occurs.
With this in mind I decided to use the theme of flight as the basis for my presentation. This will make things a little more interesting (and memorable) for my audience. It will help me use some really nice visuals on screen. But more than anything it allows me to take what could be quite a dull subject (how to use a piece of software properly) and turn it into a great story, and this is what the human beings in my audience will love.
So what’s step 2?
Now it’s time to write that story. With my Mind-Map (and lots of coffee) in front of me I sat down for about 90 minutes and wrote the script for my presentation. To help me do this I used a really simple format which you can see below.
The above document was created in Microsoft Word. At the top of the page I have the title of my presentation, and the objectives that I am trying to achieve. When I start writing my story I always refer back to those objectives to make sure I haven’t missed any of them.
The page them splits into a table with two columns. The left column is where I write my script/story, and the right column is what I’ll use later on to sketch ideas for imagery into (more on that in a sec).
As I start to write my story I constantly look back to my Mind-Map. This helps me remember the theme of my presentation (flight) and also gives me an idea of the order in which I should be talking about different sections. Without that Mind-Map I’d be flying blind (see what I did there!) and it would be very difficult to create my story.
Once I have everything written down I hit the print button and review what I’ve done. I might go back and make changes when it comes to rehearsing my presentation.
Now that I have my words, I can start to think about my pictures (NEVER THE OTHER WAY AROUND) so I grab my printout and a pencil and start to doodle in the right hand column. You can see this below.
I’m no Picasso but the doodles I’m making here make perfect sense to me and they help me start to understand what images I need to source or create, and more importantly how those images might fit together to build my Prezi. From just drawing a few doodles on page one I can start to see already how I’ll zoom in on details, and reveal the big picture to my audience.
I would continue to doodle away for as long as is necessary so that I have a really clear picture in my head of what my Prezi will look like. Then and only then do I start to build my Prezi!
So what’s next?
Pretty soon I’ll spend some time building the visuals for my Prezi. The way I do this will be revealed in the next Prepping for Prezi Day blog post. Stay tuned……..;-)
Russell
aka The Prezenter
