# (2) 17 Dec 2007, 02:19PM: Powerpoint Karaoke: Best Practices:
Danny O'Brien mentioned this concept and tried it out at a conference several months ago. So Leonard and I playtested it at Backup Thanksgiving (photos) at our apartment, with several of our friends. One of them, a hacker with a drama degree from NYU, mentioned that it's similar to acting exercises, which makes sense since this is a species of improv.
Before you play, you should do technical/logistical prepwork and select some Powerpoint slide sets ("decks") for the victims' use.
Technical/logistical: make sure there'll be at least 6 people participating -- 1 host/slidemover/timekeeper, 1 player, at least 4 audience members. I used a kitchen timer where I could set it to count down from some number of minutes. Make sure the video hookup to the laptop/computer works ahead of time.
Slide research: go to slideshare.net and bookmark a variety of decks. Languages the speaker doesn't know are GREAT. Leonard had success doing searches for buzzwords and jargon, but you could do well with art analysis as well. Look for decks that have around 10 or 20 slides each, with clip-art visuals & some text, and for a variety of topics -- not just all Web 2.0 stuff. Avoid:
For play: give each volunteer a time limit. Half as many minutes as there were slides worked for us, and going over 7 minutes got boring. If the slides run out but there's still time, have a Q&A!
Some slides suck in boring ways, but nearly every slide can turn into gold. I boo at on players who completely skip slides without giving at least a joking explanation.
Alternate versions that we didn't try:
And tell me how it goes!
- Comments:
Posted by Brendan at 17 Dec 2007, 12:38PM
I really want to try this but I think I need a video or a podcast example to get it right in my head. Imagining it awakens fears of the speak-extemporaneously-without-pausing exercises from improv, which always left me with sweaty hands--and those only lasted sixty seconds. I'm curious as to how you guys handle it. Does the speaker get a few seconds to look at each slide before launching into explanation? Is there audience participation? Are you actually trying to apply some coherence to the non-English slides or is it just an MST3Kalike riff-fest?
Posted by Sumana Harihareswara at 17 Dec 2007, 12:46PM
No prob. The thing started in Berlin so a lot of the videos are in German, but here's the great English-language one that made me want to try it.
We were pretty flexible. Some speakers took a few second per slide to compose themselves, some were more fluid. We had only 9 adults in the room so a little heckling, Q&A, etc. was fun and didn't get out of hand. The speaker doesn't get to just mock the slides; think less MST3K and more Uncle Morty's Dub Shack.
