Studio Sunday-Pecha Kucha Portland

I'm sharing this photo by Laura Ramage of my presentation at Pecha Kucha Night in Portland, ME about The Spirit Books on July 24, 2015 for Studio Sunday because although the event was in Portland, most of the time I spent on it was here in the studio. This was my fifth Pecha Kucha, which is Japanese for chit chat.

Here's how the event is described on pechakucha.org.

PechaKucha Night, now in over 800 cities, was devised in Tokyo in February 2003 as an event for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public. PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images. The presentation format was devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture. The first PechaKucha Night was held in Tokyo in their gallery/lounge/bar/club/creative kitchen, SuperDeluxe, in February, 2003. Klein Dytham architecture still organize and support the global PechaKucha Night network and organize PechaKucha Night Tokyo.

It's fun to present and to see the other presentations but it's lot of work. For the just over 4 minutes I spent on stage, I spent hours and hours at in the studio, first finding the images and then preparing the words. Because I want my presentations to be as natural as possible and don't want to be an actor memorizing words, I never write a script. I go through the slides over and over until it is smooth. Because of the timing and the fact that the pace is not controlled by the speaker, Pecha Kucha is more difficult than a standard speech. I started doing them as a way of getting comfortable with public speaking but I don't think I will develop any more presentations. It is such a lot of time for a format that doesn't have that many opportunities.

You know I am always looking for lessons and the lesson I take from the picture is about pants, as in the kind not to wear when you are on stage. Next time I stand up in front of a group of people, I will be wearing pants that have a silhouette of their own so you can't see the wrinkles at the knees and get quite such a close view of the shape of my legs. On a positive note, I am very happy with the top which I found at a yard sale and looks like it could be in a Spirit Book.