Videoing presentations training

Over at our curved vision site (were we offer bespoke presentation skills training) there’s an acute lack of videos; in fact there’s only one photo even, in the current incarnation of the website! There are no client videos showing how how well our training works.

Surely, as presentations trainers, video would be the obvious thing to include, right? After all, it would be strong evidence of good we are as trainers!

Well yes, but…

There are lots of ‘buts’ when it comes using videos. Firstly, to do them right takes a lot of time, effort, energy and money. Before the techno-democratists amongst you say “But what about just grabbing something from an iPhone and….?” rest assured that we’ve tried it. Stuff grabbed by that kind of equipment looks like what it is – amateur. Well, unless you put a lot of time and effort and money into post-production editing that is… and if you’re going to do that, you might as well as hired a videogrpher and his/her camera in the first place!

That said, you’re right, there are ways around almost all technical issues, if you’ve got the imagination and the right skills.

More important than just the tech, though, is the issue of the effect of the camera on the subject.  Anyone familiar with Hiesenburg’s uncertainty principle will be aware of the problem – essentially, the idea is that it’s very hard to study some things because the very act of studying it (might) change it. I say ‘might’ deliberately because by definition you’ll never know!

And so it is with video cameras.

The moment you point a camera at a room full of people wanting to learn how to be better presenters you change the nature of what you’re doing. Almost every presenter (and in my experience every inexperienced presenter) behaves slightly (or significantly) differently when they know there’s a camera on them.

Sadly, videoing them without them knowing is unethical.  :)

The only sensible way we’ve come up with (and even this is problematic) is to use a videographer who’s so good at what she does (she being “Clare”, here!) that people don’t notice that she’s got a camera in her hand, on her shoulder or in front of her face.

That level of skill isn’t easy to acquire.

But there’s more. More problems, that is.

Not only do the people we train not want to be videoed being trained but as often as not the subject matter of the presentations they’re working on isn’t something they want blasting out to world. Sometimes that’s because they want to ‘unleash’ it on the world at a specific time and in a specific place, but more often than not it’s the simple mundane issue of the contents not being flattering.

Who’d want to have part of their presentation showing if the presentation was why the company was 33% behind targets this year?! :)   And no, I won’t name names! :)