Using video for stage presentations-Part 1

When you are planning to use video as part of your use presentation from stage, the presentation of your video will need to be planned and coordinated carefully. Ideally, your presentation is rehearsed and your lighting and sound technicians need to be able to easily turn the lighting off in the room and make sure it doesn’t hit the projection screen!

Be prepared with your lighting and sound desk people, as they need to know the cue when you want to show a video to your audience. This also comes down to where the house lights switch is, and if it is easily accessible to them. Maybe it is in a different position to the lighting desk and if that’s the case have an assistant standing by the house lights switch ready to turn them off and back on again at the end of the presentation. They need to be sharp and on the ball otherwise it doesn’t work.

On stage you need to be able to say to your people roll the video, you then walk away from the screen so you’re not in front of it, the lights are turned off and the video starts to play from the start with you saying nothing over the top of it. You then have your audience’s attention. Often I see presentations where the video is shown with all the house lights on, and the speaker talking over the start, to me this is missing a vital part of the mystique of presentation.

Your visual presentation

When making a presentation do it with as many visual methods as possible and try and keep words on the screen to a minimum. I’m sure we’ve all sat through boring PowerPoint presentations where somebody literally reads what is on the screen in front of everybody? Please don’t do this!

Audiences can’t generally read and listen at the same time, but they can make notes from what you say, so use words sparingly on the screen. The only exception to this is unless you’re making a feature of it in a video. I have a good example of this on my website but for you to understand it here now the video consist of a loud pumping soundtrack with a voice-over, and the words on the screen are animated to the words of the voice-over. It is actually a very effective way of making a video without much in the way of extra visual material. It is a video editing job that will work if done by experts. However if in doubt use a picture to paint 1000 words rather than words themselves.

The reason for this is because audiences get bored if they cannot absorb all the information, and they will become restless and disengage from your presentation. Similarly, if an audience can’t follow what is being said or they are not sure why they should bother listening to you they will also disengage. The attention of your audience is crucial within the first 5 min of your presentation. Their attention span starts low and then plateaus up to the first 3 to 5 mins,  where it reaches a peak then tails off at 20 to 25 mins. Their initial purchasing decision is made in the first 3 to 5 mins of your presentation and unless you pull it back they will have already made a subconscious decision whether to listen to your not. It is therefore important to quickly establish credibility in a brief introduction, and that is where video works spectacularly well.

At the beginning of your talk you need to set your objectives in mind while delivering a presentation. You need to know what you want to achieve and also what you want them to think and do after the presentation has ended. This may be a direction to buy your product after the presentation is ended. If you do a good job you will have people walking to the back to signup before you have finished speaking! I have seen many people literally running to the back to be the first people to spend lots of money!

They all believe in the mindset that you want them to, and it is a transfer of information that gives them a reason to listen to your presentation in full. The traditional method to deliver a speech is a one-way path with no interactivity the audience, and this quickly leads to low engagement or rapport, and you will have an audience disengaging. They will not buy anything from you, whatever you say later on.

The method that has most audience engagement and therefore their attention involves two-way dialogue and puzzles, with the audience being asked questions unexpected to answer by putting their hand up or answering questions en masse. This gives the audience the feeling they are in a group that thinks the same and so they feel comfortable. This way there will be the greatest absorption of information and they will remember your talk and will relate to you.

Ideally to get a better idea of what makes a good speaker you need to learn presentation skills. Watch good presenters on video such as the late, great Steve Jobs, Robert Kiyosaki, Tony Robbins.

Your audience will make a decision to buy based on what they remember your presentation and the feeling they have toward you as a person, in essence whether they trust you or not

Don’t read bullet points

To be effective you need to present information in different forms. Most presentations disengage the audience by giving them too much information. Bullet points on the screen will actually give away too much to your audience and the audience will ultimately feel there is no need to stay engaged with anything else you’re saying to find out what ‘happens next’.

Visual cognitive dissonance is a technique used to make the audience have a burning desire to know what happens next. Dissonance is essentially a mental “state” the speaker introduces which sets off a conflict or incompleteness within the listener. It Presents something visually to an audience that doesn’t appear to make sense at their first look. The audience then impelled to look again closer as they have a desire to work out for themselves what they are being shown. Examples of this may be an Escher painting that is impossible to manufacture or other Surrealist art.

When presented with visual information, the audience block out the presenter while they assimilate the information. There are four possible outcomes from this process:

1/ I don’t understand this, so I will pay more attention

2/ I understand this fully and I strongly agree with what I see

3/ I understand this and I strongly disagree

 4/ Yes. So what?

Introducing any information that will that polarise any audience opinion is extremely difficult and also very dangerous for the speaker.

This ultimately leaves us with 1/ “I don’t understand this”.

Because it’s incomplete in their minds it’s like an itch that needs to be scratched. You will have prospects sitting on the edge of the seat waiting to hear what you’re saying next. They will remember your visual presentation and then they buy something from you.

Clearly number four is where you have lost their attention!

What’s in it for them?

The bulk of your presentation should consist of justifying what you are saying, and you will need to emphasise the benefits to them individually. Ideally you will be using words throughout your presentation that sell, words such as “now”, as in “now when would you want to buy it?”  Or “if you want this you need to go now to the back of the room”.  Also “by now” has a double meaning, it is an embedded command to buy something now, and it also can mean “by now you should understand this” . Other word such as “Immediate” and “time limit” if used well can be very effective and enhance your sales.

You will need to answer their questions they are asking all the time “what is in it for me?” If you write your presentation with the individuals in the audience in mind and not you the presenter you will be doing something that most people don’t do.

You then need to summarise the benefits for them,  and then have a Q&A section with your Mike runners standing by handy, then you finish with a close and an immediate and time sensitive call to action.

How to record for DVD sales

All of the above speaking guidelines assume you are using the video purely as a live feed to the audience so they can see what you say in bigger close-ups than they can see with their eyes. I come now to recording your stage presentation for sales as a DVD to others who cannot attend the live event. This is particularly lucrative because you only do it once and the recording of it is able to be duplicated and your time leveraged in a very effective way. There are things to remember to make it a memorable and effective DVD presentation, which can be different to presenting at the time. You will certainly need to keep the DVD in mind whilst you’re presenting and there are some things that you need to do to make it work more effectively.

Firstly you will need to make sure you are heard effectively on the recording of course, and a live feed of your voice, along with anybody else talking and video sound needs to be recorded. (I will talk about recording of a live video screen in a short while)

Perhaps one of the most important things to remember is making sure the length of your presentation is broken up into chunks. The main reason for this is the recording length of the recording media the cameras will be using. When I talk about media I mean videotape / flashcards or hard disk drives recording. Depending on how you do it each camera may have a recording time of perhaps an hour and half, so if your presentation is two hours long there will need to be a change of media whilst you are talking.

Sometimes the camera has a slot for a flashcards that is awkward to get to if the camera is a tripod, so ideally use cameras that have easily accessible flashcards and battery compartments.

Ideally the cameras are running off mains power, but if this is not possible you will need to have each camera with several backup batteries that can be changed as quickly as possible.

Clearly if a media change is required and all the cameras are identical and they start recording at the same time (which they would normally) they will obviously all run out of media at the same time. This is not ideal! It creates a whole in your presentation video of perhaps a minute or so while the camera operator is changing their media. Clearly this creates a problem and will be a distraction for you, so this needs to be as seamless as possible, and you need to go to talk for up to 2 hours at a time without breaking for cameras.

I will share with you one trick we used to use in multi camera concerts where the cameras were recording on to separate media (such as film or video tapes for example). Just so you know film cameras normally have a running time of around 10 mins, so this creates more of a problem because you have six magazine changes every hour! On tape it was perhaps 30 to 40 min maybe, but still if it’s now a 1 1/2 hour concert there would still need to be many tape changes. On a bigger concert there would be several cameras that have a direct feed to a larger recording deck so there is least one camera recording at all times during a concert. However we probably don’t have that luxury!

The trick to this is we would stagger the start of each camera so if we had say 10 cameras the first five would start recording, then perhaps a minute later the other five would start. This gives a short time to change media in the first five cameras as they will run out before the others. We need to know which cameras started first of course, and each camera operator needs to say what they’re doing and at what point they are over the walkie-talkie or the comms system. So it may sound like ” camera one reloading”, “camera 4 reloading” until all of them have started recording again. This is communicated to a central area with somebody making notes of the timings and when people changed.

Clearly this is a much bigger deal than a three camera video shoot covering you on a relatively small stage, but it is a useful tip if you have the same cameras and you don’t want to be embarrassed having missed something crucial in a presentation because the cameras are reloading! Another easier way of doing it is changing the media before it fully runs out

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©2017 John Keedwell

Epics Academy Ltd.