Behind the scenes of a Pecha Kucha presentation

Last month we did our first Pecha Kucha presentation for Krea and it turned out to be one of the most challenging things we had done so far. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Pecha Kucha(Japanese word for chit-chat) is a rapid presentation style centered around a simple idea: 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds. The presentations are timed and each presenter gets exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds to deliver his presentation. You can read more about Pecha Kucha here.

So, Krea’s kreator-in-chief Pravin Shekhar wanted us to convert his research paper into a Pecha Kucha style presentation which is to be presented at the ESOMAR Congress – Odyssey 2010 in Athens, Greece. Contrary to the usual informal tone of a Pecha Kucha, presenting a research paper in 6 minutes and 40 seconds is pretty serious business. There were some important lessons to be learned from this assignment. Here are a few challenges that we faced while making our virgin Pecha Kucha presentation.

Batman and Robin

Different people use presentations in different ways. Some people totally depend on a presentation while presenting an idea. In the words of Garr Reynolds, ‘it is like their security blanket’. Then there are people who treat the presentation as an accessory or a cue to their speech. Pravin is one such guy. He can speak effortlessly for 6 minutes and forty seconds(and perhaps for much more than that) and convey his ideas perfectly with or without a presentation. So in his case, the presentation had to be a visual key to his ideas. It had to be as engaging as the words he spoke and as charming as his personality. There was no space for a mismatch.

Big things in a small package:

One of the biggest challenges of this assignment was to condense the information of a research paper into a 20 slides presentation. We went through his research paper umpteen number of times to understand the scope and depth of his work, his ideas and tried to figure out the key messages that he wanted to convey to the audience. Our approach was to divide-and-eliminate: Divide the research paper into parts and eliminate the parts that were unimportant. After much deliberation we could come up with a storyboard that covered the core ideas of Pravin’s paper and conveyed that information in a logical manner.

A visual journey:

Presenting before a global audience, Pravin wanted his presentation to be a visual journey that highlights the various divides that exist in India. Thus all the images in the presentation had to be in the Indian context. Finding images thus became a daunting task as very few websites offer decent Indian stock images and so our options were pretty limited. After a lot of effort(during which Firefox crashed 17 times!) we found some great images that helped us create a stunning visual experience for Pravin’s audience.

The great tussle between text and images:

We come from a school of presentation design where images are given a free reign. We let our images do the talking, accompanied by little or no text. However in Pravin’s case, we had to convert a research paper into a presentation so sooner or later we had to make a choice between text or images as a means to convey the ideas. We chose the middle path. Half of the slides have less than Ten words on them. And yes, No Bullet Points!

All in all, we thoroughly enjoyed making our first Pecha Kucha presentation. It was challenging and it was fun. Pravin is going to deliver this presentation sometime later this month and we at Effect Works wish him the very best for his talk. We are also looking forward to participating in Volume 3 of Pecha Kucha Night Chennai, sometime in November this year. Good things are round the corner.

(Image courtesy: Felix Chandran)