Weeknotes: 2022, Week 11

Penultimate week at Big Bite. I've decided to do a handover presentation in video format to save everyone's time. Rather than have everyone gather round the telly at the same time, just let them consume a video async and fire any questions back over to me in Slack. Presentations are great for communciating a message in a memorable way, but they are a time suck, and severely constrained by a fixed time. The new remote world is beyond these constraints so it's time I moved on.

As a result this has led to learning the difference between communicating effectively via a presentation, and communicating via a video message.

Videos vs. Presentations

1. Pace

My first attempt at the video involved recording me talking as I would in a presentation - from notes. On watchback, it was slooooooow. I do deliberately talk slowly when presenting to allow me to formulate my next thoughts, and to allow everyone to keep pace, but when put in a video format it seemed unbearably slow. In video I may just get away with a snappier tempo - if someone misses a phrase they can quickly recap it.

2. Body-Positioning and Awkwardness

In a presentation, you can get away with more movement and pacing around. This is not the case on video - you need to stay in the same spot for the camera. As a result, this can get pretty awkward if you're on camera for a long time - I therefore found much more use in more frequent cutaways and visuals than I would use in a presentation. It is like editing a show rather than throwing together some slides (see point 4).

3. Eye Contact

Related to the above - you can get away with moving your eyes aroiund when you have an audience - not so when you're on camera. If your eyes stray a millimetre away from the camera it looks a bit odd. Cue unnatural amount of time staring into the camera while speaking. I don't know how TV prsenters do it!

4. Content

For videos it's much more than putting together some slides and amusing GIFs - although I found these are very useful to use to cut away to when you've been hogging the camera. Demo videos are very useful, and are probably easier to take in during a video.

Overall, videos are much faster paced, and what would have been a 15 minute presentation becomes a 5 minute video. It takes longer to put together (especially for the first time when you're learning the technology and most of the things I've mentioned above) but you're saving a lot of time for your audience, multiplied by teh amount of people watching.

What else I've learned this week

I learned about "Wood Tubes" this week. It would be cool to use these on a stud wall - I wonder how they compare in cost to timber.