I was invited to give a keynote at High Performance Graphics this year.
Ten out of ten, if you can, I would reccomend the experience of going to a "smaller" in-person conference, the community experience is unmatched. Whilst you get, of course, a lot of "energy" from the huge crowds at GDC or Siggraph, that's also their main downside. You rush from room to room, spend lots of energy every day, it can be tough and impersonal. The magic of having a single track, for three days, and being able to actually talk and know the person next to you - it can be quite refreshing.
That said - here are the goods: Video recording, and the slides with notes.
If you don't want to suffer through my heavy Italian accent, I'd reccomend to go through the slides (which have a ton more details and notes than what I presented live anyways) and then open the video only for the rather lengthy Q&A session. In retrospect, I wish I had better answers for some questions (especially the first one by Shirley) but overall it's worth a watch.
Surprisingly, I got some very good feedback on the talk from what it felt like everyone at the conference, must have been something in the (wonderful) Scandinavian food - but I hope you'll enjoy it too! Let me know!
The bads.
I could end it here, and it would be a short and sweet post... but that's not what I do, do I? So here are a few extra notes, on how I create my presentations and why you should not use my methods (and frankly, neither should I).
This is the madness:
1) Start by jotting down notes & ideas - for a while.
I've been refining my note-taking setup for decades, everything goes on paper - and sits there for a while. This is also how this "blog" works, some post ideas can even stay in my notebook for years. I don't end up publishing what's necessarily the best - far from it - but whatever moves me to action. All I do is still, fundamentally, a product of passion.
2) Start noticing themes, try to arrange ideas ideas into something coherent.
Rinse and repeat - might fail a few times.
3) When I'm persuaded I have something decent, I move to digital.
At a given point in the process, something "wins" and trying to keep edits on paper becomes too messy. That's the point where I know I've settled onto a theme and I'm just iterating on it. It's inconvenient to try to do so in the notebook, so I start a digital outline. In this case I used google docs, also because I knew I wanted to share it with friends to get some feedback.
I'll still put ideas and "to-do"s on paper when they arise, it's just much more convenient to write jot down a few lines with a pen rather than having a computer always with you, opening some software and so on.
At this stage I don't care about the wording of things, I care about connecting the pieces in a reasonable "flow".
4) Once the outline flows - move to slides.
Textual outlines are great because you remove the distractions of having to think about pictures, graphs, the amount of text in a slide and so on. They free you by focusing just on the ideas. But there's only so much I can do in pure text, so once I'm in the ballpark of a decent flow, I move to slides.
Over the years I've become better at not making overly dense slides, and moving stuff down to notes - but I'm still not great. Also, I still don't trust advanced features like... animations, or videos. If I need to have transitions, I'll just duplicate a slide by hand, and change the elements as needed.
5) Iterate, iterate, iterate.
I pretty much keep changing things up to the last minute I have to be on stage. It's terrible - I know, I think if I cared about it, someone would find a clinical term for my personality - but I think it's silly to try to fit everything into mild pathologies.
I don't rehearse, so timing is always an issue for me. I can estimate where I should be in the delivery, time-wise, from the amount of text, especially if I wrote comprehensive speaker notes... This plan in this particular instance was thwarted by forgetting to start the slide timer - you might or might not notice my mild panic at not knowing how long I've been talking and thus speeding things up a notch.
In all seriousness, there are things I like about "my ways" and things I know don't make me a great speaker. What I like is that in this very organic process I think I can find something interesting, and in many cases unexpected even by myself. I'm thinking about things, connecting some dots, and in the process, truly creating something new.
At the same time, I know this is my biggest downfall as well, I end up diverting into too many things, diluting my message - because I never start from a strong one, I always tend to "find it" in the process. I also just can't help cramming stuff, it's an egoistic thing. I like it - I like what I do, and I do what I like - and that's not the best attitude when you should instead think of maximizing other's enjoyment.
I'm pretty sure that for anything I ever wrote, everything I ever presented, if I was a better editor of myself, able to really sharpen the focus on a single point, it would be a much better communication.
So. Don't be like me. Drive strongly to a point, find the point, write it big at the top of your page, and remove anything that it isn't needed to reach that destination.
At the same time, I hope you can be inspired, before doing that, to wander around, a bit like me.