OUGD501 - Studio Brief 01 - Presentation Practice

To practice our presentation skills, we were told to put together a 90 second presentation on a film of our choice. To make sure that I was confident on what I was talking about, I chose my favourite film, Forrest Gump. I knew from previous presentations that having only visuals is a better way to keep the audience's attention rather than having writing on screen. 

I made all of the images on my presentation full bleed, keeping consistency throughout the presentation. I had also planned what I would say before I went up, this helped a lot because I do get quite nervous when I am in front of a large amount of people.

I knew that I wanted to include humour in the slides as making the audience laugh makes me feel less nervous so I added a meme halfway through the presentation to get a laugh from the audience. 

My technique basically went through the whole plot of the film, which in hindsight I wish I hadn't done as it was hard to cover everything that needed to be said that had happened in the film. It would have also definitely ruined the ending of the film for anyone who hadn't seen it. Instead, I wish I had just gone over the basics such as cast, general plot (without spoilers), directors, when it was set and when it was made etc. as I much preferred other people's presentations in my group who used that approach. 

It was also suggested that it is a good presenting technique if you have a beginning, middle and end, therefore, when you end your presentation people know that it is over rather than standing there. 

Another good tip was that the use of white space around an image draws the attention to it and away from you presenting, therefore for my real presentation I plan on getting rid of the full bleed images, instead opting for white space around the outside.

A lot of people used GIFs in their presentations which also worked really well. Projecting your voice is also extremely important and if something goes wrong you need to carry on. I was told that there was one downside to my presentation was that I could have looked more at the audience but as I had not practiced that much and I kept having to look at the screen to see what slide was next and talk about that part of the film.

This task has helped my presentation skills, I feel like I have more knowledge on how to lay out my slides and how to present in front of a group of people.