Everyone says you should tell a story, but exactly how do you do that? Aristotle was pretty clear about it 2,400 years ago when he wrote Poetics, and Hollywood screenwriters more recently have adapted his ideas to the idea of a visual story as they apply to 2-hour films.
But when you craft a story for your PowerPoint presentations, you are entering a new media domain beyond the familiar, where classical ideas of rhetoric blend with multimedia in an age of interactivity.
To find your own clarity and focus, try out the 3-act story template I describe in my new book. If you'd like to see a 10-minute Flash demonstration showing how you can use the story template to structure the first five slides of Act I of a presentation, click here. Fair warning: critical thinking and screenwriting are not easy tasks, but with the right tools you just might find the narrative you're looking for.
P.S. There's a known bug related to viewing the Flash file using a Mac or Firefox - hopefully I'll have a fix for the problem this week.
Gotta love Camtasia! Nice job on this.
Posted by: Jim Pickering | February 09, 2005 at 07:10 PM
Get Keynotes it is what Power Point should be. Once again Apple drives the market. Look for Microsoft come up with a "me to" as usual.
Mike Hughes, Ph.D.
MOS Power Point
Posted by: Dr. Mike Hughes | April 01, 2005 at 07:09 AM