Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences

So yesterday we went through Part One of Duarte’s 2Day VisualStory training. There were about 30 of us in the training room at Duarte in Mountain View, sitting at tables, being led through a journey of storytelling ins and outs by our capable and amiable expedition leader named Kevin. Nancy Duarte was there at the beginning to welcome us all.

Resonate book duarte

The basis for this first day of training was the book Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences which I had just bought a few days ago for iPad. They gave us a paper copy of the book but I don’t regret having the multi touch version on iPad. The advantage of the iPad version, which was created with iBooks Author, is that it has all the videos from the training at the touch of a button as well as diagrams that enlarge and quizzes at the end of each chapter. 

The training was really helpful. We were writing up the essence of our presentation on post it notes and sticking them on our story board. And with advice from our tables, we were changing them, refining them, shuffling them around, adding stories and sharpening the structure. Looking at the basis of my presentation when I started the day, its pretty obvious that it now has direction and a structure that makes sense. Still a lot of work to do on it, but I have some good tools and ideas now.

Today is the second part of the training which is focused more on the presentation and not so much on beating our stories into submission. They are giving us the book Slide:ology to accompany the training. Cant wait!

Freebie: At yesterday’s training we examined great speeches and why they worked. Nancy Duarte spoke on How Great Speeches are Structured recently at TEDx. Have a listen.

Some thoughts:

I was reminded of Hillman Curtis’s approach to refining a story. Hillman’s books were very influential to me in my digital storytelling days. I just found out that Hillman passed away last week at age 51. We had a little correspondence – see my post Hillman Curtis and me. Praying peace for the Curtis family.

I also thought of Haddon Robinson who taught Denver Seminary students to preach using the structured tension points of a typical television episode.

Andrew

Andrew Jones launched his first internet space in 1997 and has been teaching on related issues for the past 20 years. He travels all the time but lives between Wellington, San Francisco and a hobbit home in Prague.

2 Comments

  • This is really helpful. Got a lot out of Nancy Duarte’s clip. Need to see it more than once. Wish I was at Mountain View. Thanks a lot.

  • Hi Andrew, sorry to hear about Hillman Curtis. I was going to comment that I really enjoyed his book, then clicked through to your old post and saw my comment from 2004 about just ordering it on your recommendation, where does the time go?! I’ve really got out of the swing of blogging/html stuff but keep meaning to resurrect cedarlily at some point. Hope you are your tribe are doing well, Abigail

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