High Concept – how business presenters can learn from the movie makers

In recent weeks I have been discussing the importance of keeping to time in any kind of presentation and how a short presentation invariably needs more planning and rehearsal than a long one. Message distillation, which always plays an important role in ensuring clarity of communication, also becomes crucial in short presentations.

There are various techniques for message distillation and most appear to be quite simple; actually putting it all into practice, however, tends to be rather difficult. So I draw inspiration from the movie makers, who have a range of particular needs to distil their messages. They have to start by pitching the idea to the money men and once their film has been made their promotion is often dependent on the limited medium of posters, together with word of mouth. So they need to get people talking – and doing so accurately – about their movie. Furthermore, the window of opportunity is short. Unless people respond to the word of mouth in the next week or so it will be too late; the movie will already have gone from the cinemas.

Steven Spielberg says: “I like ideas you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me their idea in 25 words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good movie”. Sam Goldwyn was rather more succinct, declaring: “If you can’t get your idea on the back of a business card you ain’t got a movie”.

Movie makers therefore work around the principle of ‘high concept’ – a short sentence that tells you all you need to know about the movie and inspires you to go and see it.  Examples include:

An asteroid a s big as Texas is hurtling towards Earth – Armageddon

Boy and girl from rival gangs fall in love in the middle of a gang war – Romeo & Juliet

Giant shark terrorises holiday resort – Jaws.

My own favourite example of High Concept concerns Sandra Bullock’s early success Speed, which was all about a bomb on a bus which would go off if the bus travels at less than 55 mph....and rush hour has just started. This was really a little too wordy for a High Concept, so within the business it soon became referred to as ‘Diehard on a bus’. Now you exactly what to expect.

Finally, the ultimate High Concept film has to be Snakes on a Plane. The High Concept wording stuck for a while as a working title, until Samuel L. Jackson's agent insisted that a ‘proper’ title be adopted, because his client "couldn't work on a film with such a title”. When Jackson heard about this he responded with the much cited comment: "We're totally changing that back. That's the only reason I took the job: I read the title."

Extracted and adapted from Nick Fitzherbert’s book Presentation Magic, published by Marshall Cavendish.

How to learn Presentation Skills from Boris - by doing the opposite!

The spotlight falls on Boris Johnson tonight as Michael Cockerell’s documentary airs on BBC 2, and it has already highlighted a few uncomfortable truths for the Mayor on the Andrew Marr show preview.

Whatever you think about Boris Johnson he has some great achievements to his name despite, or perhaps because, he is such an extraordinary figure.  As is often the case with extraordinary people it is not necessarily a good idea to copy them in your own quest for success. A generation of schoolboy cricketers, for instance, was advised against trying almost anything they ever saw the legendary Ian Botham do on a cricket field.

Arguably it would be counter-productive to give Boris any kind of training, but a study of his communication style does throw up a few nice examples of how not to do it – if you are anyone except Boris. His use of negatives, for instance, has been known to be so extreme that it resulted in an ‘award’ from the Plain English campaign.

The principle here is that negatives need to be avoided because they impede clear communication; any sentence including a negative needs to be unscrambled before it can be properly understood. If, for instance, I were foolish enough to give a tray of drinks to a small child, I might say: “Don’t drop it”. The way their brain is going to interpret that information is as follows: 1) Drop it – that’s the general concept, then 2) Don’t.  By this time they have probably done exactly what I told them not to do, because all the attention has been on dropping.  If, instead, I said: “Hold it steady”, the instruction is immediately clear, there is a certain amount they can actually do about it and they can certainly visualize what is required. 

The best example I have ever see of this principle in action – because I saw the impact immediately - was when my son received his half-term report.  It concluded: He is making every effort to be efficient and well organised, not without success. My son was in tears; all he could see was ‘not’ and ‘without’, connected to the word success.  His little 11-year old brain couldn’t or wouldn’t unscramble the message to what his teacher meant, which was ‘with success’.

Now look at the quote that won Boris a rather dubious award:

I think he is saying that he agrees, but you have to unscramble and unscramble to get through to the meaning.

One proviso I make to the increasingly international make up of the business executives I coach in presentation skills is that I believe this mis-use of negatives  to be largely a British problem, that tends in particular to afflict those who have been to English public schools and can’t quite face up to saying what they actually mean. People, in fact, like Boris who have trouble in saying what they really mean when continually asked questions such as “Do you want to be Prime Minister”?

Extracted and adapted from Nick Fitzherbert's book Presentation Magic, published by Marshall Cavendish.

How rock band Queen showed the way to becoming champions of the short presentation

Last week I discussed the importance of keeping to time when giving a presentation.  There are plenty of reasons for sticking to time and you can read about some of them if you scroll down.  

I would now like to expand on the theme by looking at the challenges presented by being given a very short time slot in which to present.  The fact is that, unless you have plenty of experience at giving short presentations, it really is quite difficult.  Anyone can give a long presentation – it is achieving the same (or greater) effect in much less time that requires expertise. As Mark Twain once said: “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” 

My favourite example of the way that a short time allocation needs more work, not less, comes from the world of rock music.  Anyone who remembers the original Live Aid concert in 1985 is likely agree with Bob Geldof’s assessment that “Queen where by far the best band of the day”. Queen succeeded against the odds, as they were not exactly at their peak at this time. Perhaps that’s why they took their planning for the event so seriously, with shortage of available time being at the very front of their minds. They went for a greatest hits set, morphing them into a medley and culminating in a ‘We are the champions’ singalong. 

Lesley-Ann Jones

Then they did something that I only discovered when I read Lesley-Ann Jones’s excellent book Freddie Mercury: the definitive biography. While other bands regarded 20 minutes at Wembley as something they could knock off in their sleep – Dire Straits admitted that as they were playing at the Arena next door “we just wandered across the car park with our guitars” – Queen committed to some serious rehearsal. They booked The Shaw Theatre in London’s Euston Road and spent a week rehearsing for that short 20-minute slot.  And once they had it perfect they re-worked it so as to come in just a little under time.  As a result of all this preparation – and attention to timing detail - they stole the show and people are still talking about it to this day.

As I say, editing yourself down to a short time is difficult and you need to be brutal – I may come back to this one day with a discussion of ‘Killing your darlings’ as they say in the movie business, but start off your editing process like this:

• Script what you would ideally like to say as if you had no time restriction
• Carve it all up into a) what you must say, b) what would be good to say and c) what would be nice to say.
• Start rehearsing and keep rehearsing until you come in at just a little under the time you have available – and be ruthless!

For the record, my own most challenging presentation came when I was invited onto the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2 to explain the Rules of Magic and how they could be applied to good effect for businesses during the recession.  One catch: I had three-and-a-half minutes!  I can’t possibly cover the topic in such a short time, I thought; on the other hand I was very interested in the opportunity of addressing 6.5 million listeners.  I applied the must say/good to say/like to say principle and then adjusted it all to suit radio broadcast.  As a result, I received enquires that took me all over Europe and eventually led to a publisher asking me to write my book Presentation Magic.   

So you can do it if you’ve got the right incentive.  Next week I’ll have a look at how the movie makers distil their messaging with a principle known as ‘High Concept’.

The importance of keeping to time when making a presentation – and using an analogue clock!

There was a bit of a debate going at The Magic Circle last week and it was all about timing.  One of the contestants in the finals of the Close Up Magician of the Year had been disqualified for running over the strict time limit, sparking discussion that perhaps we were rewarding clockwatching skills rather than magical excellence.

Now, I need to be a bit discreet here.  When I was awarded membership of The Magic Circle I swore to abide the society’s motto ‘Indocilis Privata Loqui’ and a lack of Latin is no excuse for giving away secrets! The nub of the argument on one side, however, was that any performer needs to be highly disciplined and you certainly can’t expect a TV job, for instance, if you can’t stick to a very tight timing brief. On the opposing side, it was pointed out that this was Close Up magic – typically performed around dinner tables and involving a lot of audience interaction where the timing requirements can be hard to predict. 

It occurs to me that we face very similar challenges when making business presentations.  Our ‘audience’ has other calls on their time and often need to get away at a given moment; and in a something like a pitch situation there are other ‘acts’ waiting to come on.  Similarly, to be truly engaging you probably need a degree of interaction, possibly encouraging questions as you go, making it more difficult to hit the timing mark precisely.

Good practice aside, the crucial reason for sticking to time is that the most important part of any presentation – and indeed any magic trick – is the way you close.  You need to send them away with your big key message ringing in their ears – like the ‘ta-dah’ moment of a magic trick.  So imagine if you are overrunning your time allocation.  You are going to have to rush your big closing moment; you might even be deprived of it by someone telling you to stop!

So the best advice for ensuring that you come in on time and reap the benefits of doing so is as follows:

• Rehearse enough to be absolutely clear about what you are going to say. This is good, indeed essential, practice anyway, but it also means you will cut out a lot of superfluous words that clutter any talk that comes straight off the top of the head.
• If you have some content that would be nice to include but not essential, build this in towards the end so that it can be cut (harmlessly) if necessary.
• Build in some leeway for interaction with your audience.  Also, announce up front whether or not you are happy to take questions as you go.  If time is really tight, then ask for questions to be saved for the allocated Q&A time.
• Then aim to come in slightly under time.  It will give you an extra bit of leeway and people will thank you for it.

Finally, you obviously need to keep an eye on the time, so have a clock or large watch in view, but make sure it has an analogue display.  The reason for this is that the position of the hands on a clock face sends the brain an image that can be understood at a glance without thinking.  A digital read out such as 10.25, for instance, needs to be fully processed by the brain in order to be understood and this becomes a potential distraction for the speaker.