If someone came up to me with the following proposal in 2001, I would have laughed them out of the room:
“Hey TJ, give me a million dollars and let’s make a movie. The movie will be entirely made from a lecture by Al Gore. And it will be a PowerPoint lecture on global warming. We’ll use lots of numbers, statistics and scientific data. It will be great; we’ll make $50 million and we’ll be the toast of Hollywood.â€
“Ha! Ha! Ha!†I would have said.
But I would have been wrong. “An Inconvenient Truth†the Al Gore Documentary has done all of these things.
How? Especially considering most people didn’t like listening to Al on their living room TV for even 90 seconds back in 2000. Now he captivates them for 90 minutes?
For starters, the producers and Gore made sure they used great PowerPoint images. Throughout the entire 90 minutes, you see scarcely a slide or two with more than one word of text on it. Gore uses photos, images and simple graphs through the movie.
The key word is Simple. In my own world of presentation training, the biggest inconvenient truth I know is that audiences don’t follow or remember more than one idea graphically represented at a time. Gore and Company used a lot of graphs, but they never got greedy. They never tried to show charts with numerous variables all on display at one.
Next, the movie had variety. You never saw one part of the lecture droning on and on and on. Instead, the movie would cut to private reflections from Gore, or scenes of him in front of different audiences. Variety is something all great speakers bring to their presentation, whether they have Hollywood directors at their disposal or just by mixing up their own presentation in front of a live audience.
Finally, the producers simply edited out Gore at his worst. Gore has a tendency to SPEAK TOO LOUDLY. When Gore does this, he does seem passionate, for about 5 seconds. But then he does it for a minute or two or even longer. The result is that he seems annoying, condescending and grating.
Gore’s director and producer simply edited all of the too loud Gore out of the movie. Instead, they only used Gore when he was speaking in a conversational manner; sometimes he was no louder than a whisper. The result is that he sounded fresh, likeable and easy on the ear.
If you don’t have a team of Hollywood producers or directs at your disposal, that is no excuse. Simply videotape yourself giving a speech and then make notes of the parts you don’t like. So if you find that you also have a tendency to speak too loudly in a monotone, you can ‘edit†that habit out of your next speech.
Remember, anytime you are giving a live speech to an audience, you are your own director, producer, and star of the show. So make the most of it.
Originally published as A Silk Purse by TJ Walker for SpeakingChannel.TV
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