Speaking about Speaking, Part 3 — Preparing the Stage
This is the third in my series of posts on giving technical conference talks. In the first, we discussed preparing yourself, and in the second, we discussed organizing the content. This is now about preparing the stage. So you have great content, and you’re mentally and physically ready to go. Here are a few things I do to prepare the physical space in the moment and get ready to present.
Tip 1: Walk the Grounds
I always make sure to check the room out before speaking, so I know what to expect. I want to see what the talk experience is going to be like, both from the perspective of an attendee and from the perspective of the speaker.
From the attendee perspective, the best thing to do is to watch an earlier talk in that room — how big is the room, how far away does the speaker seem, how easy is it to see the slides, is the audio at the right level, etc. From the speaker perspective, where is a good place to stand, will you be blocked by the podium, how widely can you roam, are the lights going to be in your eyes (common at big venues), etc.
Tip 2: Mike Check
The whole point of this exercise is literally for your voice to be heard, so it’s important to get the mike and volume right. The AV people at any venue have a very tough job. They are there to help you be your best, though, and are almost universally awesome to work with. Often they will give you a choice of a few kinds of mike, and it’s definitely OK (and expected!) for you to have your own preferences. Express them.
After years of speaking to various crowds, I actually prefer no mike at all. If the room is not completely massive and has halfway decent acoustics, I can usually fill it with my voice without augmentation (any trained singer or minister could easily do the same). This works great for a workshop or a meetup, but it unfortunately doesn’t work if we want to record or livestream, so I have to get over using a mike. (For many years, the premier JAOO / GOTO conference in Denmark was held in the Musikhuset, an honest-to-god concert hall at the Aarhus University. With theater-style tiered seating, and used mainly for musical performances, that place has *amazing* acoustics!)
So a mike it is. I’m not a big fan of the podium mike, because I like to move around.
I also don’t really like the Brittney Spears headset mike because my natural presentation volume is surprisingly loud. I’ve given a number of talks which came across as blah and low-energy, exactly because I was holding back on my volume with the headset mike. I thought that that was inherent in that mike style, though, until an excellent AV person a few weeks ago offered that he would tune (way down) the volume at the speakers so I could speak at my normal volume and not blow everyone’s ears out. I did not have to hold back, and the talk went great.
I can make do with a handheld mike, and it’s great because you can easily move it closer and farther to control the volume. Fut I find I regularly need to juggle the mike, the clicker, and a bottle of water. So my personal preference is the lapel mike that connects by wire to a wireless antenna box clipped to a belt or in a back pocket.
The lesson for me was: be crystal clear about what you want, and why you want that, and the AV people will make it all happen. They are pros, and their job is to help you shine.
Tip 3: Water, Water, Everywhere
I need to drink a lot of water when speaking. During a talk, my mouth gets very dry very fast, and so I like to have water there at the podium. Usually the venue will think ahead and provide water, and that’s great. But it’s your job — if you need it — to make sure you have it accessible. It’s perfectly OK to ask the organizers (or even an attendee :-) to get you some, too, if you are running short on time.
Tip 4: BYOD
I really prefer to present from my own laptop. It means I’ll always know everything works (a bit of a theme here), and also that I will be able to improve the slides up to the last minute ;-). The cost is wrestling with the display adapters, but that is hardly ever a big problem.
Tip 5: Plug In
I always bring the power cord for the laptop and make sure to plug the laptop into power before starting. On a modern laptop, driving the screen is the most power-intensive thing it does, and you definitely don’t want to have to stop in the middle of a talk to rescue a drained battery. Sometimes there is a Mac-friendly plug right there, but usually not.
Tip 6: Adapt and Overcome
I try to bring with me a VGA-to-DisplayPort dongle, since many older venues traditionally had only VGA, and more than once I’ve had to beg an adapter from someone in the audience. Thankfully, VGA-only venues are now fewer and fewer, now that we’ve entered the world where HDMI is the standard interface for displays (hooray!), and my current Mac supports HDMI natively without any adapter. So for most of the last year I haven’t needed a dongle at all. How freeing!
(Of course, in Apple’s infinite wisdom and never-ending efforts to make laptops lighter and thinner, the most modern ones drop HDMI and USB-2 ports, and so it was fun while it lasted … back to dongles again, grrr :-| )
Tip 7: Point and Click
Many venues provide a USB clicker to advance the slides. I really like to have one that I know will work, though, and particularly one which is easy to move forward and backward. Some of them are surprisingly nonintuitive for such a simple device.
I resisted investing in my own clicker for a long while, but at the enthusiastic twitter recommendation of Simon Brown, I sprang for a Spotlight, and I could not be happier. In addition to the fact that it always JFW, the Spotlight has ergonomically intuitive buttons for forward / reverse, which have subtly different Fingerspitzengefühl (“fingertip feeling” — I just love that word!).
But the coolest feature is the eponymous “spotlight”, where if you depress the third button, hold it down, and move your hand around, you can move around a virtual spotlight to highlight a particular part of the slides. And because Spotlight’s laptop driver integrates with all the popular presentation software, it overlays it *on the display*. Never ceases to get an ooh or aah. Add a sweet carrying case and a clever place inside the remote to store the USB dongle, and it’s the best clicker ever.
(You’d think I was a paid spokesperson, but I’m just an enthusiastic user. Such intuitive and completely-thought-through design is sadly pretty rare.)
Tip 8: Presentation á la Mode
I am a big fan of Presenter mode when giving a talk. The display mode just shows the slides, and that is what the audience sees, but presenter mode shows the next slide / reveal, the current slide number, the current time, and any speaker notes you have.
(I don’t use speaker notes — I use the oft-maligned practice of putting multiple bullets on slides, and they serve as their own documentation — so a little pet peeve I have with Powerpoint is not being able to completely close the speaker notes pane and recoup a bit more screen real estate to see the slides. Anyone from Microsoft listening? …)
I did a web rehearsal of an upcoming talk recently where I only had the display mode and not the presenter mode, and it was disorienting. I’ve definitely become reliant on being able to time myself and find out unobtrusively how much farther I have to go. Also, if I am going to run long, it’s great to be able to surreptitiously skip some of the slides without the audience being too distracted.
Tip 9: Test, Test, Test
Just like software, or anything else that matters, a presentation needs to be tested early and often. My ritual is to plug in the clicker to the laptop before connecting with the display, fire up the talk in presentation mode, and click forward and back a few times.
Then I connect up with the display, make sure the slides are both visible on my laptop and up on the big screen, and do the same thing — put it into presentation mode, and click forward and back a few times.
As you can see, there is an incremental, test-driven approach here. Start from a known state, change one variable only, and test again — just as when you are building good software.
Show Time!
You’re now plugged in, miked up, and ready to go. Let’s do this!
Thanks for reading this far. In the next few installments, we will talk about giving the talk itself, taking and answering questions, and learning and improving for next time.
