Better Scientific Presentations

In recent months I have turned to documentaries for inspiration. Truth be told, this post is inspired by Sheila Bernard's book Documentary Storytelling. Make no mistake, documentary makers are researchers, some scientific, some not.  In any case good documentaries contain important lessons for scientific presenters. Learning from documentaries is only helpful if you watch a same documentary several times and start identifying its structure and visual consistency. Particularly,  listening the director's commentary you will find that there is a lot of valuable and important material that doesn't making it to the final cut.  This is a lesson for all scientific presenters: you can't present all what you have found and pretend that your audience is going to care. Documentary-makers face the awful challenge to compete with fiction films. It would hard to get people interested in documentaries if directors, producers and writers don't show their research in a creative ...

There are many lessons to learn from films, such as story-boarding, visual composition, and editing. Here is a quick trick to make your visuals moving forward through your talk. The trick is called "wiping" and in it you move from slide "A" to slide "Z" by wiping "A" with "Z", like this: The line between the two slide is meant to give a connection between them.  The connecting element is important it provides continuity.  This simple scene is made of two main elements: The transition itself and the connecting line.  Let me show you the details. 1.  The transition.  Although it looks like Z wipes A, The transition is done in A, it is called "Push" and it is done from right to left.  2.  The lines. Moving A from right to left and connecting it with Z means that the line is at A has to at least go to very end of the slide, in this case the slides are 1024×768 are therefore the line goes up to 1024. To keep the continuity,...