How to present your plausible promise

Garr Reynolds (<em>Presentation Zen</em>) <a href=”http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2009/06/text-images.html”>has a great post up highlighting a new Youtube presentation</a> on “The New Urbanism.”<div id=”scid:5737277B-5D6D-4f48-ABFC-DD9C333F4C5D:71ad3ce7-e5ea-4027-b491-dea0aec2b9e1″ style=”display: block; float: none; margin-left: auto; width: 425px; margin-right: auto; padding: 0px;”><div><object classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ width=”425″ height=”355″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″><param name=”src” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/VGJt_YXI&amp;hl=en” /><embed type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”425″ height=”355″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/VGJt_YXI&amp;hl=en”> </embed></object></div></div>The presentation itself has to do with how urban sprawl affects the world’s carbon footprint, and how we might redesign it. The video itself is not really the point, however. The style of the video is, and you can do the same thing for missions presentations.
The video is comprised of a number of photos overlaid with text and a nice musical track. To do much the same thing for missions, you would need:<ul> <li>Photos of your unreached people group and their surroundings</li> <li>An excellent, but short, script</li> <li>Perhaps a nice musical track</li></ul>If you don’t have any photos of your unreached people group, you’d best start hunting for some! You might start, depending on how big your group is, with pictures from the web or from <a href=”http://www.istockphoto.com”>stock photography sites</a>. However, be careful of the licensing requirements, especially if you plan to post the video up on Youtube!
One trick the presentation uses is to put the pictures in motion, which gives the effect of the camera zooming in over the picture. The <a href=”http://www.videomaker.com/article/14088/”>use of stills is discussed on videomaker.com</a>, which also gives a <a href=”http://www.videomaker.com/article/14088/”>how-to for the pan-and-scan effect</a> pioneered by Ken Burns.
By far the harder part of presentation is the script. Watch the presentation and notice how the script itself isn’t very long: its packed with specific key words, which are replaced in sequence. Crafting an excellent script is something you should spend a significant amount of time on. (For another example of a short but powerful script, see the 2008 edition of “<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8″>Did you know</a>”).
Finally, a nice musical track is used to great effect in the New Urbanism. You might be able to coopt an existing musical track your ministry has access to, or license one from one of the stock music websites. I strongly urge <em>not</em> using the stereotypical Christian worship or praise tracks. Use a track that is meaningful and which doesn’t have any words to it: you don’t want the <em>meaning </em>conveyed by a praise track (or any of its associated words) to distract from the minimal number of words you are already trying to convey in the script. Don’t let two pieces of the presentation argue with each other!