The first presentation we gave at our capstone class was a total failure. I was mainly put in charge of the slides and this resulted in a jumbled mess with us not communicating what we wanted. It was immediately after this that I started asking why this happened and what we could do to prevent it into the future. In this process I started to personally define some presentation archetypes that individuals use, and by extension groups become used to.

Primarily there was a difference in how I set up presentations and how the team had previously been presenting. Max Sanel, the previous producer my team had all worked with, was what I call an Overlord type presenter. He prefers to stay in constant control and bring people in when their slide comes up. On the other hand I tend to be a Performer presenter where person to person transitions happen on their own. Now I don’t think there is one right way to present but rather the rest of the team had been used to an Overlord style while I was used to the Performer Style.

Taking this into account made me realize that we needed to meld the expectations of the group and create our own hybrid. Every presentation since that one has heavily involved everyone on the team to make sure we all know what slides come when. Our Designer, Richard Conti, is also more of an Overlord presenter and was able to control the presentation while melding me in when needed. In this way we’ve incorporated both styles over the course of the semester and have nailed down a flow between Richie and I since we are the main talkers in our presentations.

One of the things I look forward to next semester is integrating others in, or integrating into, the team and learning their presentation assumptions. This will be paramount when trying to pitch our game into the future and I feel it would be best if we tackled it early. Doing this also has the benefit of people feeling like they belong on the team and understand what their perspective is. They might not be the one talking throughout the entire presentation, but they will have an understanding of how best to convey the information that they know.

Thank you for reading!

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