Flickr CC: buzzrichie
Pecha Kucha is a presentation strategy that involves 20 slides (typically visually oriented with little or no words involved in the entire sequence) that automatically advance every 20 seconds forcing the presenter to give a talk in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Jason at Profhacker introduces the concept thoroughly. Having been previously introduced to the concept, I excercized it for the first time last semester in a visual communication course. I found that I was surprised at the organic nature of the presentation, and consider it one of the better “talks” I’ve given.
I’ve heard it said that “if you can’t be good, be brief”. However, short does not mean it is good, and not all pecha kucha are designed equally. With that, I’d like to discuss some tips and tricks (and perhaps opinions) about Pecha Kucha.
Firstly, Make a template. Go ahead and set up 21 slides and set the first slide to “advance on click” and the other’s to advance every 20 seconds. This way you can load your presentation and not have it automatically advance. This way you can avoid having to hurry into your presentation the moment you open it up the presentation. I used the first screen as a Title screen and clicked in as I began my talk.
Avoid words in your slides. I appreciate the notion of Pecha Kucha being visual, thus avoiding the slide reading that many are familiar with (dread). Even in my title slide, I used a “sign generator” to make a billboard with the title of my presentation on it. While Photoshop or Illustrator could be used, web apps are quick and painless.
Don’t “read” your presentation. One Pecha Kucha that I saw was presented by a person who very cleverly examined the amount of typed text that they could read in 20 seconds and then approximated that in a script format for each slide. While this worked moderately well technically,in my humble opinion it lacked panache. Artful performance enhances any presenation. I prefer to prepare my talk by running through the slides. My most recent Pecha Kucha involved about 4 full length dry runs and it worked very well (in my opinion).
I created my presentation to be intentionally episodic. I had a new idea for every slide and though each slide was not related to the next it followed a logical progression. In that way I was able to cut off after each slide and start the next. This helped me avoid getting into a really long discussion on any one topic and going down the proverbial rabbit trail.
One person suggestion I have heard is to think of your pecha kucha as you would storyboarding a cartoon. As a visual medium, pecha kucha benefits from being manipulated visually. An interesting strategy for this is to get brainstorm images and then make cartoons of them on post-it notes, and to manipulate them in this manner. Otherwise the images can be pre-sorted in Power Point and then dragged around in the slide sorter.
Regardless of the value of these suggestions to you, I implore you to employ all of the creativity that you have in giving presentations and in particular doing a pecha kucha. Performance ability is key to any type of presentation, however, It is my hope that some of the tips listed above will assist you in using Pecha Kucha as an effective presentation tool.
