TJ Walker describes a 2004 training in St. Croix where engineers remembered a fluttering bird animation but forgot the actual message. He argues that flashy effects distract from content and that rehearsal matters more than tweaking slides.
Chapters
I was conducting a public speaking presentation training skills class in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands on an oil refinery. Kind of a cushy gig to get when you're a presentation skills coach. And I was working with five engineers. One day, one of the engineers stands up, delivers his PowerPoint presentation. In the middle of the presentation, there was a little bird that fluttered across as a special effect in one of his slides, by design. And this was around 2004 or so. So the special effects were not that sophisticated with PowerPoint or anything else back then, more than 15 years ago. But it fluttered, and I looked at the room, and everyone's like, oh, wow, cool. He finished his presentation, and I asked people, what do they think? They said, oh, that was really cool. They were saying, how did you do that? How did you get that special effect? How did that flutter happen? I said, so we're all in agreement. That was pretty cool, right? That was interesting, right? That was a nice special effect, right? Everyone agreed that that was a really interesting thing to have in the PowerPoint slide in this presentation. But then I had to be the skunk at the party. I said, okay, now who can tell me what the point of that slide was of that animation, that special effect, and anything on that slide? All of a sudden, all the hands that were up in the air went down. Then I asked another question. Who can tell me anything that your colleague said during that presentation? Any message? Fact number, nobody had any idea. So. So is that good to have special effects? It is if you're trying to sell your ability to create special effects for movies and other things. But it did not help this particular engineer talk about the specific problems he was trying to solve as it relates to how he was redesigning elements of that part of the refinery. It didn't work by definition. I tested it. No one can understand or remember the message. So here's what I want you to think about when it comes to special effects. Is it truly helping your audience understand your message more and remember your message more? If it's just about shoosh, boom, bam, fireworks, it's not helping. Now, the special effects have gotten a lot better on PowerPoint and all sorts of other programs you can use to create presentations. But still, if someone wants to see flashy special effects, they can go watch a movie produced by Hollywood or Bollywood or a lot of places these days. They don't need you. So my recommendation, keep it simple. Make sure you have simple images that make your message come alive and are memorable. And don't waste time on the animation and special effects unless there's a really good reason to do it. And it helps people understand and remember the message. Okay, so why do they tell that story? It just dramatizes how sometimes we think a special effect is really cool, but it's actually a waste of time. I try to convince people not to use special effects in most presentations most of the time because in my experience, 100% of the time they'll use that as an excuse not to rehearse their presentation. You're far better off using your time to rehearse your presentation on video to make sure it's good than to start down this black hole. Because once you start on a little special effect, even something as simple as a little bird fluttering across, you can tweak it for the next two, three, four hours or two, three, four days. And human nature being what it is, you'll use that as an excuse not to practice, not to video record, not to test your speech in front of other people.
