Once more with feeling…watching yourself on video

author Richard Fennell calendar Jul 25, 2010 · 3 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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I have been meaning to watch back the video taken of my recent presentation for a while. This weekend I have had the chance to sample the highlights! In the past I have always found it hard to watch myself on recordings, though after the initial cringe this time it was not too bad. I must be getting used to the critical process.

So what have I learnt

  • I say ‘err’ to ‘err’ much ‘err’
  • I move my hands about much like Magnus Pike, a childhood 1970/80s TV popular science reference as seen in this Thomas Dolby video and this Mitchell and Web sketch, for those not old enough to remember. I don’t think it is too irritating do you? But to carry it off fully I do need madder hair.
  • I tend to wander about the stage, I know it is consider good presenting practice not to talk and walk at the same time. But does this actually get on the audiences nerves? It certainly does me when watching when I jump up and down during a demo. I think I know why I am doing it, I heard about an idea from NLP for presenting/teaching to always deliver specific types of information from the same physical location e.g. funny anecdote by the windows, summary points by the lectern etc. The idea is it subconsciously primes the audience what to expect and how to treat it e.g. oh here he is by the lectern I must remember this as it is important. I guess I need to just be a bit more sparing in the application of this technique.
  • I still use too many slides, I especially need to focus on less bullet pointed ones. When presenting at the BCS recently the projector broke 5 minutes into my session and I did the rest of the session without slides (that the audience could see). All I missed was a couple of images of Scrum and Kanban (and wild hand waving an pointing at a white wall got me round the problems). I the feedback I got was good. However a key factor was I could see my bullet pointed slides on my laptop. I realised the slides are my speaker notes. So next time I intend to try very few audience slides but have a stack much like my normal one running on PowerPoint on my phone. Lets see how that works.
  • …..Oh and I have a Birmingham accent, someone could have mentioned it!

I would heartily recommend anyone presenting to have a look at videos of your sessions, even if they are just ones taken with a camcorder or phone from the back of the room. You may be surprised how you appear, sessions often look very different to the audience as opposed to how you felt it went from the stage.

If you want to checkout my performances just search for ‘Fennell’ on conference media sites:

Enjoy……