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"Write something that's actually useful to people; preferably something that can be adapted to other uses," said Mr Editor Hallas. Strewth! Actually useful? So I thought that I'd better write about something real, something that readers could judge for themselves, and something topical.
The most recent presentation that I've produced was for the Photodesk Ltd slot in the RISC OS 2000 Show theatre programme at Epsom in October. Some readers might actually have seen the presentation, but even if you weren't there it's clear that it's something real.
I produced and gave the presentation using OHP2, so it seemed like a good idea to describe how I went about this and how the presentation came together. I'm not saying that my way is the right way, or even the best way, but it should give some insights into the planning process and how to realise the final presentation in OHP.
I planned the slot with the intention of showing people what OHP could do and how the presentation had been constructed. For this article, I'd like to start one or two steps earlier than that. In the theatre slot, I started with a formal 'talk to the slide show' presentation, improvised through a demo of the in-presentation tools in OHP and finished with a live demo and questions and answers.
So the first question is just why I structured the presentation like that.
In my case, the intended message was that OHP is a good presentation package which is likely to meet the audience's needs for presentations and other related purposes. So my ultimate aim was to impress them with the package, hopefully causing them either to buy it at the show or to go away with a positive view against the day that they did need such a product. I decided that I needed to do several things to achieve this:
To summarise this, I tried to combine what the audience would expect with items that would best support my overall aim of promoting the product through extolling its strengths. I considered the likely audience and how they might view what I had to say; I left out the hard-sell because the RISC OS community is generally too well informed to fall for it, and because I don't like either giving or receiving it.
I like to sit down with a pencil and paper for the next stage; you might prefer to use the computer, but make sure that the tool you're using is 'transparent', i.e. that it does not inhibit your thinking. The presentation needs to have a structure, and that structure needs to support a relatively small number of ideas that you wish to convey to your audience.
The basic structure of any presentation is a beginning, a middle and an end (am I getting too technical here?). The middle is the main part where you explain your ideas; the end is usually a summary of those ideas. This leaves the beginning: you obviously need to introduce the subject, and you may need to introduce yourself, too. (To my shame, I forgot to do that on the Saturday at Epsom: I didn't write it at the top of my notes, so it didn't happen!) The rest of the beginning introduces the structure of the presentation.
You are therefore faced with some basic choices. You can structure your presentation as a set of separate topics, in which case the introduction serves to warn the audience that you will cover several distinct ideas. You might instead decide that the middle part will be a continuous narrative, with the ideas being developed in a continuous sequence; in this case, the introduction can highlight parts of that sequence, perhaps as a series of questions to intrigue the audience as to the answers you will give them.
Professional trainers have a saying that encapsulates all this. They say that you should "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you've told them." You can do a lot worse than follow this simple scheme!
| The first textual slide in my presentation (shown to the right) took the second of the above approaches. The first two bullet-points describe the narrative of the formal presentation, and the second two bullets cover what else I proposed to do. Announcing a questions-and-answers topic at the beginning helps you to keep control of your presentation, and the audience is reassured that you will take questions and so is less likely to interrupt you. You might prefer, of course, to take questions as you go along; tell your audience if this is the case. I didn't, because I wanted a bit more control over the timing of the presentation. (The red cross over the cartoon in the picture is all about copyright; see later for an explanation.) |
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I captured all the slide images in this article by using OHP's snapshot facility during the presentation, then reduced them to quarter size using ChangeFSI (which should have come bundled with your RISC OS computer).
| OHP comes with a 'Gallery' (show to the right) of pre-prepared backgrounds that you can use freely, but you'll probably want to design one of your own. You can see that blues and greys predominate in the supplied backgrounds; it is usual to use 'cold' colours for backgrounds, as they are perceived as receding into the distance. Warm colours (red being the obvious example), on the other hand, are perceived as being nearer. You might like to experiment with a Draw file: put some red text in front of a blue rectangle, then swap the colours over. Do you agree with the comments on perception? |
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| The background for the RISC OS 2000 presentation needed to tie together some fairly simple slides, but I wanted a clean, professional image for the whole presentation. OHP's logo is a traditional style overhead projector (OHP) graphic, but I thought that a little fussy for this presentation. Instead, I produced a very simple textual logo from the letters O, H and P. The cream bars just save it from being too stark, and make it clear that it is a logo. Logos traditionally appear in a corner, and I chose the top-right because that's where the OHP software has its logo in the various dialogue boxes. |
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Having got a logo for each slide, I went for the safe choice of a blue background. I could have extracted one of OHP's standard backgrounds and modified that, but I decided to go for a custom file. Graduated fills always look good, so, using Photodesk (the program, not the company!), I created a dark to light blue radial fill and saved it as a JPEG. I chose JPEG simply to save disc space, as the presentation had to go to Epsom on a floppy disc.
| The radial fill starts in the top-right corner and so naturally fits with the positioning of the logo. This gives the simple appearance that I wanted but reinforces the OHP message and, hopefully, looks modern and stylish (unfortunately, I'm a programmer by vocation, not an artist). The finished item, much reduced, is shown to the right. You can see a little gradation in the fill because I captured the sprite at 32 thousand colours rather than 16 million (the file 'Background' in the archive is the original). |
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It is wise to decide on your background at the start of preparing your slides. OHP will let you change the background with a couple of mouse-clicks, but you need to think about the effect on the rest of your slides that your background will have. The position of any logo represents a 'no-go' area for the content of the slide, and influences the layout, whilst the colour of the background affects what colours you can successfully use. If you produce the other slides in Draw, and they contain text, then you also need to consider anti-aliasing.
The RISC OS font manager includes excellent anti-aliasing routines (as is well known). To exploit these from a Draw file, you need to set both the Text colour and the Background colour (both of which are accessed from the Style menu in Draw when text is selected). The Text colour setting is obvious, whilst the Background colour is the colour to which the font manager will anti-alias the text. This background colour needs to be a rough match to the colour of your background slide. If you load one of the textual slides from my presentation (02Function, say), you will see a blue fringe around the text. This is the background colour and is what makes the text look correct when anti-aliased on the presentation's background.
Keeping the size of text consistent when you present is probably important to you (unless they are clearly intentional, font size changes between slides can look very scruffy). OHP renders Draw files on screen by scaling them to fit the screen size; this means that two slides with simple text strings of different lengths will generally be rendered as different-sized fonts (because the shorter string will be scaled-up more than the longer one). To overcome this problem, you need to tell OHP how much of the Draw file (i.e. how much of the surrounding empty space) to render in addition to the text. If you keep this to a standard size and use a consistent font size in the original Draw file, OHP will always scale by the same amount and your slides will look consistent.
This is harder to explain than to do! If you load one of the textual slides into Draw (02Function, say), you will see a grey box that surrounds all the slide's content. Using such a box of the same size in each slide and keeping all the other objects inside it is all you need to do. This box determines the amount of scaling needed, and so forces the scaling always to be the same. (The box is actually made up of four separate lines rather than a single rectangle so that you don't keep selecting it by accident.) You could set the line colour of the box to None, but I don't usually bother; look out for the box when you show the presentation and decide whether you think it's intrusive or not. The basic Draw file containing the box is supplied with OHP (as the file 'Template'), but you can easily create it yourself. You just need to give it proportions of 4:3 to match the usual VDU resolutions (think 800×600 or 1024×768: how good is your mental arithmetic?).
Two of the slides in my presentation are simple graphics files: the MG is a well-known ArtWorks file, and the Photodesk logo is included as an example of using JPEGs. These are rendered exactly as they came, so the MG fills the screen. (OHP preserves the proportions of a slide by default; you can change this to fill the screen if you wish, and OHP forces this to happen with the presentation's background.)
The Photodesk logo caused some thought, as the basic file includes a white background (JPEGs can't have a mask) and is quite complex. I decided to simplify the overall effect by not using the background for this one slide. This removed the OHP logo and the graduated fill, but I made OHP's basic background colour blue to match the general look of the background graphic. The alternative I considered was making the background colour white to disguise the white border in the graphic, but I'm pleased that I didn't do this because the overall white slide would have had a disharmonious effect in the darkened theatre.
Most of the rest of the slides are really just textual bullet-points. These reinforce the spoken word in the mind of the audience and act as a prompt to you on what you intend to say next. I tried to add a graphic to each of these slides to make them more visually appealing. Some of the graphics are directly relevant, being screenshots in some form. The others are a couple of clip-art cartoons that I just added to lighten the tone. These give the basis for a joke and add a little colour to what would otherwise be a rather bland list of phrases.
On the subject of prompting you as the speaker, I have to digress onto the subject of speaker's notes. If a speaker uses a written script and reads it word for word, he or she has to be really well practised for it to sound anything but stilted. My advice is: don't do it. It is much better to put the gist of your message into your bullet points and then make a few brief paper notes of other things you want to say (keyed to the slide order). That way, as the slides come up, they remind you of your main messages while simultaneously reinforcing them to your audience; the separate notes remind you of anything else that you want to say that would over-complicate the slides. Working in this way forces you to improvise the actual words as you speak, making them much more natural and allowing you to respond to the mood of the audience. Some people worry that the lack of a script means that they'll forget what to say and get stuck; there's no way that that can happen because the next point is always right there on the screen. Trust me!
By default, OHP includes a fade to a blank, black screen at the end of a presentation. This allows you to continue talking without anything distracting your audience, and to return to the RISC OS desktop when you're ready (perhaps when the audience has gone). In my case, I went straight to the desktop to give a demo, but if your presentation is not related to computing then you'll probably want to leave all the gory details hidden and use this as a tidy ending.
| The start of the presentation is more interesting. Ideally you should have loaded your presentation (and tested it if you have moved it to another machine) before your audience arrives. It is then tidy to be able to leave the screen either blank or showing your first slide while the audience comes in, starting the presentation proper at your leisure. I chose the second course and added an OHP-related slide as my opening banner (see right). |
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As an aside, I felt that this slide sent a clear message as to the purpose of the presentation, but apparently not. Despite it being on the screen for about 15 minutes before I started, only after I showed the next three slides (all featuring the letters OHP) and starting talking did one member of my audience ask when I was going to talk about the RiscStation portable! On being told that this was the following presentation, he decided to leave! C'est la vie. The message here is to introduce yourself in words of one syllable.
You need to ensure that your computer is configured to anti-alias large text for the best effects. Use Configure (which probably means double-clicking the !Boot application on your hard drive), find the Fonts settings and ensure that the Anti-alias setting is at least 72 points (I suggest you also set the Cache bitmaps size to the same value and ensure that your Font cache is set to several hundred kilobytes). To my further shame, I didn't recheck this setting for my Sunday presentation, and gave the whole thing without anti-aliased text. Shades of Powerpoint™!
To show the presentation use the 'Run' icon at the end of this section. Alternatively, to start it manually, double-click the file RISCOS2000 in the archive, or drag it to the OHP_Show icon if it is already on the icon bar. Note that some controls are available from the Choices dialogue box available from the icon bar menu: use interactive help (the !Help application) to understand them.
| The screenshot to the right (taken from the full version of OHP) shows a graphical summary of the slides within the presentation script. Once the presentation has started, use Select to move forward and Adjust to move backward (or the left and right arrow keys). The three slides after the start graphic (above) will change automatically. To exit the presentation, move forward from the all-black end screen or press <Escape> or <F12>. During the presentation, click Menu (or press F1) to get a help screen of presentation controls. I've included some extracts from the OHP user guide at the end of the article to explain further the controls. |
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Some points to look out for during the presentation are:
| Now start the presentation by clicking on the 'Run' icon to the right. |
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Enjoy.
The licences with both clip-art collections are orientated towards paper publishing. I used the images in my RISC OS 2000 presentation without a problem, and could have used them in Foundation RISC User if it were a paper magazine. However, the licence does not allow me to redistribute the images in electronic form unless you, dear reader, cannot recover them. Since they reside in Draw files as part of the presentation, you could in principle recover them.
I've therefore spoilt the images to stay legal (sorry). What you can see is a sprite copy of the original Draw-format graphic, so the original is not recoverable; to emphasise that you are not seeing the best quality graphics, I've added a red cross through the picture. If you set your display to 32 thousand colours and 1024×768 resolution, you should get a result which is almost indistinguishable from the original. A lower resolution may give a less good result and a smaller number of colours definitely will. This is not a feature of OHP, just me being careful of others' copyright. While you present clip-art but do not publicly redistribute the file, you won't have this problem.
The controls are mostly controlled by a single keyboard key; pressing it once will engage the effect and pressing again will cancel it. Pressing Space cancels all effects and can be used as a 'panic button' or just an easy way of getting back to where you were. The Slide Hopper, controlled with the <Ctrl> key, works slightly differently and is described in a separate section.
The following controls are available:
To use the Slide Hopper, hold down the <Ctrl> key while presenting and use Select/Adjust, or the left/right arrow keys, to move quickly through your slides. Each slide is shown as a thumbnail (miniature slide) with its file name inside a frame. The frame is normally red, but turns blue to indicate a hidden slide. When you release the <Ctrl> key, the hopper display disappears and the presentation moves to the chosen slide.
If you change your mind about hopping, or simply get lost, clicking Menu (or pressing the down-arrow) while the <Ctrl> key is still held down will return the Slide Hopper to the current slide. Releasing <Ctrl> at this point will cancel any hopping action.
The Slide Hopper also acts as a Mute control during the presentation, so just tapping <Ctrl> will silence any sound effect.
You can set whether the Slide Hopper shows thumbnails, filenames or both from the Choices dialogue box. Note that OHP_Show can only use filenames.
