Unrelated, but moving on, anyway. Great! More TED talks! Truly ideas worth spreading. This one is by Scott McCloud, the man who by volume is responsible for more of the content on this blog than any other individual (as inventor of the 24 hour comic, you see, which related posts account for 16% of the bulk of this blog; almost a full sixth-- in total 158 of the 985 posts up at press time (including this one, which for the record I am counting as not being about 24 hour comics, though still directly dealing with Mr McCloud.)) If you've already read his Understanding Comics trilogy, there aren't many new ideas here, but if you haven't, you'd better buckle down to have your mind blown...
If you have read those books anyway, I still recommend giving the video a play through nonetheless. You'll see why.
Isn't he adorkable? This talk comes from, holy crap, this month, one decade ago (the website just says, filmed Feb 2005; doesn't have the precise date, so... who knows, it really might be from exactly a decade ago today).
I told you the video was worth watching, anyway, even if you already know the basic material in it. Did you spot it? How could you have missed it? The man is a master of slideshows. Makes sense, actually, considering their affinity with the "comics" format. There's so much potential in the medium, I've always felt (and especially grew to appreciate on the mission for some reason.) It's not just for boring business presentations, the same way that Comics aren't just for pappy kids' stuff. Multimedia, real-time, performance art. It's used the way it is because it is ideal for directly transmitting a message-- it's because of its power that it's stuck in this ghetto of business meetings, but it can be so much more powerful than that, as hopefully we've gotten a taste of here. In short, I believe in slideshows the same way Scott McCloud believes in comics. (I also believe in comics the same way he believes in comics.)
PowerPoints are ephemeral creatures, "real time" like I said, but comics is a print medium, capable of being visited and revisited at a moment's notice-- maybe I've gotten away from myself a little bit here, but both media's secret power lies in juxtaposition.
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