Wednesday, July 30, 2008 3:09 PM
by
loufranco
Preparing a Pecha Kucha, Part I
I've been preparing for my Pecha Kucha at the Business of Software conference.
The idea behind Pecha Kucha is to keep presentations concise, the
interest level up and to have many presenters sharing their ideas
within the course of one night. Therefore the 20x20 Pecha Kucha format
was created: each presenter is allowed a slideshow of 20 images, each
shown for 20 seconds. This results in a total presentation time of 6
minutes 40 seconds on a stage before the next presenter is up.[wikipedia]
To try to get used to the style, I'm taking a presentation I gave at AIIM in 2007 and rewriting it as a Pecha Kucha.
I'm going to post it tomorrow, but I wanted to write this post about some tips:
- Hone down the presentation to a single core message. In a Pecha Kucha, you really only have time to make one point.
- Time your speaking voice. I've calculated that I can speak about 50 words in 20 seconds without having to go too fast. That means that the whole presentation is about 1000 words, which is really short. This constraint is really a blessing as you can just throw out anything that doesn't support your main point.
- Get good images. I've had great luck at this free image site.
- If you're having problems finding images that make sense for non-visual topics, try searching for the emotion that you want your viewer to feel. I used "surprise" and "easy". Also, go from the emotion to something that you associate with that.
- Practice. Practice. Practice.