Slick Presentations Without Bloatware

Think of making an electronic presentation and, if using the ubiquitous Windows OS, one automatically thinks: PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is good, of course. Very good. In fact, it’s so good, presenters often go overboard in adding sounds and special effects, turning a simple presentation into a three ring circus. Three Ring Circuses have their plus points, but those points don’t go down too well in a corporate setting.

Let’s face it. What do you need in a corporate presentation? Some slides to display certain tables and charts. Some slides to highlight the salient points of your talk. Some kind of transition between slides and some way to control the transition. That’s it. The other bells and whistles make nice selling points for the software, but use them in a presentation, and you’re likely to send your audience home with bells ringing and whistles blowing in their heads, instead of what you want them to remember.

Ever think of using Adobe Acrobat? That’s right, that software you use to zip files across the Internet without having to face font-matching issues or long upload and download waits. Acrobat has a pretty nifty presentation feature, and the PDF you create is far smaller than a ppt file. As a test, I created a two-page presentation in Acrobat, and, using the same graphics and text, created one in PowerPoint. The resultant ppt file was 45 K. The PDF? 11 K.

But what if you don’t have Acrobat?

There’s still a way – and a pretty quick way at that – to create your PDF presentation.

Here’s how.

First, download the free PDF reDirect printer from:
http://www.topshareware.com/PDF-reDirect-download-7757.htm

Install the software. It adds a “virtual printer” called PDF reDirect onto your PC. I’ll tell you how to use that to create a PDF file in a minute. First, let’s create your presentation. You can create it using any document creation software, or, for more sophisticated presentations, graphic utilities like CorelDraw, Corel Photopaint or Adobe Photoshop. Beware the bells and whistles, though.

For now, let’s talk about making your presentation using Word. Open a new Word document. Go to File > Page Setup. Click the Paper Size tab. Choose SVGA. Click OK. Choose a background if you wish, by going to Format > Background and then selecting Fill Effects. Choose a texture, pattern or picture and OK your way out. Now lay out your slide, putting a picture if you wish, bullet points, whatever you wish your slide to have. Press Control+End, then Control+Enter to go to the next slide. Repeat these steps to add as many slides as you need.

Now you’re ready to make your PDF. Go to File > Print and choose PDF reDirect as the printer. Click OK and type a name for your PDF, after navigating your way to wherever you wish to save the PDF. Click Save. Depending on the number of slides, creating the PDF may take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or two.

Once it’s ready, here’s how you can set up your PDF into a presentation:

Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader (use the latest, it’s free to download and use anyway. I use 5.0). Click Edit > Preferences (or click Control+K). You’ll get a dialog box showing you various options and check boxes.

If you wish to have your slides advance automatically, check the “Advance Every” box and type the number of seconds you wish each slide to be displayed.

Check the “Advance On Any Click” box. (Even if you check the automatic advance option, it’s a good idea to keep this box checked too)

If you wish to have a repetitive presentation (such as at a kiosk at an exhibition) check the “Loop After last Page” option

Make sure the “Escape Key Exits” box is checked.

Below these options, you’ll see the Default Transition drop list. Random Transition is usually good enough, but if you prefer one type of transition, select that one. This is where PowerPoint scores over PDF, since you can specify specific transitions for each slide in PowerPoint, which you can’t do here. To my mind, it doesn’t really matter, though. Random Transition works fine for me.

Click OK.

To view your presentation, Go to View > Full Screen (or press Control+L)

That’s it! Your presentation’s done!

Note: If you make your presentation this way to an open audience, you are likely to be approached afterwards by someone with suggestions to make your presentation better. He (it is almost always a he) will offer you kindly advice on adding bells and whistles. Then he will offer you his card, which will say he belongs to a design house. Smile at him and say thank you, then ignore his advice. He isn’t your target audience.

Disclaimer: The author has no affiliation with Adobe or Microsoft. All trademarks and copyrights are acknowledged.

Acting in the Stillness of Silence

Disclaimer: The following acting tip is not for the professional. You already know how to do this. You’ve trained for it. Spent long hours grappling with yourself to evoke, on demand, emotions called for by the script.

In his book, “Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style”, Steve Vineberg describes Marlon Brando in a scene from Fred Zinnemann’s The Men. In the movie, Brando played Bud Wilochek, a paraplegic confined to a hospital bed. Of the scene, Vineberg says, “Struggling to pull himself up into a sitting position in his hospital bed with the aid of a bar suspended above him, Bud presses his eyes shut and quivers with the pain of the exertion; if Zinnemann had wanted to shoot the scene with nothing but a close-up on Brando’s face, we would measure Bud’s progress exactly by the gradations in that quiver.”

So how would you do that? How would you let your audience know exactly what you’re going through, without speaking a word?

You may, of course, deconstruct the scene beforehand, mentally sketching each gradation like a storyboard, and practising those gradations until you get it right. However, there’s a danger that you may lose some of the freshness of the scene. Your act may seem too practised, too contrived.

Try Mental Verbalisation instead

“Don’t tell me the story!” I heard a young amateur actress exclaim exasperatedly once, when the student directors were attempting to explain how they wanted a particular scene played, “Tell me what you want me to do.”

We were shooting a film, a project by students of Mass Communication. That particular scene had already been shot thrice, and the directors were still not happy. The poor, inexperienced students knew what they wanted. They just didn’t know how to tell her what they wanted. So they told her the story over and over again. “Your father is dying,” they’d say, “you are approaching his room. There’s a play of emotion on your face. Your body language says that you want to be strong, but at the same time you feel the vulnerability of a child who is about to lose her father.” After hearing this for about the fifth time, the poor actress was ready to cry from frustration.

As the directors went into a huddle to discuss camera angles, I called the young actress aside and took her to the spot where the scene was to be played. I first asked her to define three emotions she needed in the scene. Pat came the reply, “Fear, resolve, uncertainty.” Then I asked her to define a spot for each emotion. She carved the set into three areas, with a prop to trigger each emotion; a door for the first, a painting on the wall for the second, and finally, the closed door of the father’s room for the third.

Then I asked her to think of a sentence representing each emotion. She defined her three sentences. Then I asked her to simply say the sentence in her mind as she approached each trigger prop.

“Action”, came the call, she came through door, a flicker of fear registering on her face. There was a curious, huddled cast to her body as she walked. When she reached the painting, her body came erect and her jaw set in firm resolve, only to melt into uncertainty seconds later as she approached her father’s door and reached out a trembling hand towards the doorknob. “Cut,” yelled the elated director. There was a moment of hushed silence, then a whispered, “Beautiful!”

How it works

When we think “actions”, we try to visualise ourselves, but we aren’t all directors. We can’t direct our actions like our teachers did in school, when they directed us in the school play. Trying to visualise and direct our own actions, therefore, leads to awkward, artificial performance. Our minds are busy on the actions, and we fail to feel the emotions.

Actor Simon Callow puts it well, in his book, “Being an Actor”:
“An actor who performs in a certain way because the director told him to, is not really there at all. He’s in the past, his mind always harking back to the rehearsal room, thinking desperately: `What did he tell me to do now? Oh, god, I’m sure that’s wrong.’ And so on. The performance will never grow, the actor’s tension will block off any real expressive vibration because another, irrelevant person has clambered onto the stage between the actor and the audience: the director. The actor must own his performance, and the director must make sure that he does.”

Verbalisation, a mental conversation you carry on with yourself, is a good way to own the performance. Your mind has no time to think of cameras, and lights and actions and expressions. It is busy telling the emotional part of itself what to feel. When the feelings are there, the actions follow.

"T'ree buns and a chicken, men. Aks anybuddy"

Okay, here’s a neat party trick, which I’ve actually used in giving extempore speeches and in writing exams. I read it in Mukul Sharma’s column more than two decades ago, and the fact that I still remember the trick says something for its efficacy.

Here’s how you zap your friends. Ask them to draw up a list of ten unrelated words. Have them number the words. Then have them read the list to you, pausing for around five seconds between each word. When they’re done, you tell them each word on the list, from memory.

That’s no big deal, someone will say, it’s easy to remember ten words. So you take up the challenge, and prattle out the list, BACKWARDS. There’ll still be some sceptics who’ll say, that isn’t very difficult either. Then you give 'em the zinger. Have them call out numbers between one and ten, AT RANDOM, and you TELL THEM THE WORD THAT CORRESPONDS TO THAT NUMBER!

That should knock 'em dead.

How do you do it? It’s pretty simple, really. First, you memorise the following rhyme:

One is a bun
Two is a shoe
Three is a tree
Four is a door
Five is a hive
Six is a stick
Seven is heaven
Eight is a gate
Nine is a line
Ten is a hen

Note that each word rhymes with the number to which it corresponds. Now, when your friend reads out the list, relate each word on his list to the words in the rhyme. The wackier the association, the easier it is to remember. For example, let’s say your friend’s first word is “prestidigitation”. Well, you just think of a clumsy prestidigitator juggling buns and dropping the sticky ones on his head, smearing his hair with jam. So, when you are called upon to recall the first word, your mind goes, “one-bun-sticky hair- juggling-prestidigitation.” That’s all there is to it! Of course, you need to know the meaning of “prestidigitation” in the first place.

Be careful using the trick in your extempore speech, though. I mean, if your speech is on traffic accidents and your points are “helmets, rear-view mirrors and brakes”, you don’t want to wind up telling your audience, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the best way to prevent accidents is to carry your buns in a helmet, put your shoes on your rear-view mirror and carry a tree to use as a brake.”

Logs, Bogs and Blogs

Right, everyone says I need to have a Blog, so here I am.

This isn't a Blog about me, it's a Blog about you, so tell me what you'd like. I can talk about theatre, communication, searching the web, and a whole lot besides.

Tip of the day:
Try limiting your search instead of broadening it. Use quotes, Boolean operators, etc. to get just a few pages that are likely to have EXACTLY the information you seek.

Done. Your move,

Deepak