Presentation Coaching: The Speaker as Camera Man

I was looking for my childhood home on Google Earth, and caught a glimpse of it from 30,000 ft., then zoomed in and saw my mother’s herb garden at the bottom of the back lawn.

My Mom and Dad still live there, but I saw cars I didn’t recognize parked in the driveway.  The image was of late fall or winter because part of the lawn was brown, where my father had planted Zoisa grass in the early 1960s because he was at war with crabgrass and dandelions.

I saw the weeping willow given to them by my mother’s colleagues in Real Estate when my sister died in 2001.  It was leafless, more evidence of a cold month.

I saw no Jack Russell terriers leaping after tennis balls on the lawn.  It was a still image, one moment at the house I grew up in, viewed from the sky at a great distance, and then, as I zoomed in, from the point of view of a crow, perched on the limb of a nearby maple.

It reminded me that film-makers use wide angles and close-ups to tell their stories.  Wide angles create the setting, and close-ups bring us face to face with brutal reality.

Abraham Lincoln did this in the Gettysburg Address.  With his first sentence, he invites us to gaze at the continent and 90 years of history.

“Four score and seven years ago,” he begins, “Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation….”

In one sentence he summarizes the historical setting for the audience—both time and place.  And then comes the close up.  “Now we are engaged in a great Civil War…”  With that sentence he locates his audience in time.

“We are met on a great battlefield of that war.”  Now we know where we are on that continent we saw in our mind at the beginning.  We are located in space—in Gettysburg, PA.

The President then went on to ask what we as Americans could do to honor the fallen, and his answer suggests that we rededicate ourselves to the principles of representative democracy.

Like me looking for my childhood home on Google Earth, Lincoln first fixed his listeners eyes on the big picture—the wide angle.  He drew them to consider the continent and the history relevant to the present. 

And then he brought to their attention the current conflict, and the bloody field where the bodies lay—zooming in on the problem, on the question that needed to be answered.

This is a powerful model for presentations.  Starting with the big picture, the setting in which the story takes place.  Then zooming in on the problem or opportunity that draws our attention.  Raising the questions that need to be asked and answered.  And then finally supplying an actionable and evidence-based answer.

I zoomed out from my view of my old home so I could see the woods my friends and I used to play in.  Still there, now owned by the Nature Conservancy, I imagined the woods held the ruins of our forts made of sticks and leaves, where we fought battles with imaginary Indians and went home for supper when it got dark. 

Sims Wyeth is a private speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in executive speech coaching and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 12:40 pmand is filed under Arranging Content, Attention, Communication, Presentation Skills, Speakers from History, public speaking skills. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.