Presentation Zen : The power of the visual: Learning from Down Under promotion videos

I was drawn to this article because I had heard of the rule of thirds before, but I had never really considered it to be important in a presentation sense. I had heard of it in my video class, and now taking a step back I can see how a video is a presentation and a presentation is like a showing of a video. I think that this rule is important to incorporate into my group’s presentation because it could really be helpful in gaining the audience’s attention and holding it for the rest of the presentation. I think that by having images that are pleasing to the eye as well as using the image to guide the audience’s eye towards words on the screen (like the surfer example in the article) will be a way to improve the overall presentation. Although my group is not doing a video, we can still make our visuals that we do end up using great. I agree with Reynolds when he says that if you’re going to use visuals you might as well use them the correct way. I am not positive what my group will end up doing presentation wise but I think since we do have the topic of video games, using some animation might help tie our topic to the presentation and create a nice flow. I also think that our group should have a timeline set up, since we talk about retro gaming all the way up to modern and casual gaming. With this we could use some great stills from the games themselves as representatives of what we’re talking about. I think not only could we use this, but also make our own images. 

I think that the presentation of the images is important and I know, personally, watching a slideshow or presentation when the images are great to look at and complex, rather than being plain and dead center, make for a more interesting presentation. As someone in the audience I enjoy when images can hold my attention because it makes me listen to what is being said, and then I learn more on the subject. I think that with our presentation it will be important to hold people’s attention with our images. I know that not everyone will be immediately interested in our topic, it took me a little while to find a certain section of video games that held my attention and that I became interested in, so I know that we’ll have to draw people in with images and then show them the many different aspects that our topic covers and why it is important.