Pechakucha

I was recently commissioned to make a movie from a PowerPoint presentation. I'm no big fan of PowerPoint, but the client was Dark Angels, whose website I designed and continue to maintain, and I knew there'd be more to this than met the eye. The title was "Pechakucha", which meant nothing to me at the time so I searched for the term online.

Pechakucha (or Pecha Kucha), meaning "chit chat" in Japanese, is actually a method of presentation developed by two Tokyo-based architects, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. You take 20 slides, let each slide run for 20 seconds, and you have a presentation lasting 6 minutes 40 seconds. I've attended much longer presentations. Some were tedious in the extreme, while others have expected me to read lots of text whilst trying to follow the narration, which I've often found exhausting.

The Pechakucha method is a great discipline. Only use your 20 best/most relevant slides and keep your narration short and to the point. Practice and rewrite until you have a punchy and entertaining presentation. I would also recommend the method as a means of showing off holiday snaps. You could easily make a wee holiday movie to upload to YouTube, for example, using only your best 20 snaps.

Here John Simmons presents a superb example of the form. Enjoy!