PRESENTING YOURSELF ON SCREEN WITH JULIAN DISMORE- LJMU Doctoral Academy
Monday 12 June 2023, 8:30-10:30 AM EST
PART 1: PROFESSIONALLY PREPARE FOR AN ONLINE, IN-PERSON, FILMED OR RECORDED LECTURE
• SELF PREP...
~Wear a solid color vs busy prints
~Wear professional attire vs overly casual, no tee shirts
~Have simple, clean hair and make-up
• LIGHTING PREP, SET PREP...
~Set up effective lighting source, natural and/or electric...DO NOT back light
~The background.../"set" and items/props ought to match the lecturer’s expertise:
I.e., for an academic or authority on the subject, a bookcase with subject texts
~Make the entire image, including the background, interesting and beautiful vs distracting or overly busy...simple and clean may be most effective
• CAMERA/SCREEN PREP...
~Crop your image, as your head/face and shoulders ought to “fill” not “float” on the screen
~Avoid canned or blurred backgrounds as they do weird things to the screen image
PART 2: OPEN AND DELIVER AN ENGAGING LECTURE
~Start with something amazing. I.e., a surprising statistic, or a relevant-to-the-lecture-topic fun fact
~Engage the audience by being immediately enthusiastic and passionate
~Make them laugh at least once in a while…(I note in the US, we call this edutainment)
~Be expressive, enunciate clearly, speak passionately throughout, and…
~Use poignant pauses throughout
~Use your hands throughout
EXERCISE A: To grab my audience, write 2-3 sentences to begin a lecture, memorize it, then deliver it straight to the audience.
ME: The title of my practice-led research project, Reframing: On Abstract Painting, Color & Otherness, contributes to the re-gendering of abstract painting. It consists of a series of auto-ethnographic inspired abstract paintings. I am a 2nd generation Italian American, abstract painter-academic, and base my color palette on my own feminine, olive-complexioned, now assimilated white, othered existence. It also contains seven essays, each written using a different intersectional methodologies, to analyze different aspects of my new work. Finally, I include nine artist interviews that I’ve conducted with other contemporary abstract painters whose creative ideas are also influenced by intersectionality.
~Feedback from Julian to me: Add a draw-them-in opener. Add passion by being aware of your voice inflection, and USE YOUR HANDS TO GESTURE. (My translation: Don’t be so dry, or be much less serious and boring.)
PART 3: ADD VISUALS WITH A VOICEOVER TO THE LECTURE
• Use images and/or video clips
• Have basic text on the images…add it image/screen left, or bottom, or right
• Add to the image a voice over with additional interesting image/topic information
EXERCISE B: Select a couple of images regarding your lecture, and add basic, label-like information text to the images. Write 2 lines to further inform about the images, info not necessarily included in the text, then, as a voice over to go with the images/text, read the lines aloud.
ME:
Do you know who the first abstract painter was?
If you have no art history background, but you know a little about abstract art, you might guess someone like Pablo Picaasso, or Jackson Pollock.
If you have taken an art appreciation or art history course, most likely you’ve learned that it was Wassily Kandinsky.
But none of these artists were the first abstract painter.
The first known, purely abstract painter was a Swiss artist named Hilma af Klint.
~Feedback from Julian to me: Brilliant, just be sure to use your hands- (I was literally sitting on them!)
PART 4: CREATE, THEN USE INTERVIEW CLIPS DURING THE LECTURE
• Get ethics approval/form
• Write interview questions
• Invite and book interviewee/s that I am most interested in meeting or hearing/learning from…i.e., Interview the world’s top authority on the subject
• Document by zoom or video recording the interview
~Use a portrait formatted camera Film for social media (TikTok or IG)
~Use a landscape formatted camera for computer or stage lecture
• File entire raw interview video for long-term use
• Edit a "full-length" version
• Create short clips of various lengths (i.e., 5 min., 1 min.)
• Label and store all interviews…raw interview, all edited/various length versions
PART 5: CLOSE THE LECTURE
• Use one of these effective, engaging closing methods:
~Tell me one of your main take-aways from today’s lecture…or
~Tell me something that you learned today, either something new or something that you did know but you forgot until hearing it anew or re-framed today…or
~Use a question, i.e., what inspired you most about today’s lecture?...or
~Give a relevant-to-the-lecture assignment for next meeting/class/lecture
