For the group tutorial this week, a Presentation Skills Workshop with Matt Kepple and Laura North.

The Session

Laura and Matt have been running these sessions for some time, but this is the first time 100% online. Matt and Laura are in separations locations too.

Everybody feels a bit nervous about public speaking, so we’ve going to use a framework to help. We’re going to do a one minute talk to learn principles of how to give good presentation. These can then be applied for longer presentations.

Think about three questions:

1. What was your motivation for working on it?

2. What is special or interesting about it?

3. What was one challenge, and what did you learn from it?

Now use these as a structure for your presentation:

• 10 seconds: Introduce yourself and say what your project is.
• 10 seconds: Briefly introduce your three key points.
• 10 seconds x 3: To Talk about your three key points in more detail.
• 10 seconds to summarise what you’ve said, and end with a thank you.

For the first draft, I presented to Sharon for feedback, and vice-versa.

For the second draft, I presented to Katerina and Leonie, and with Jonathan and Laura for feedback, and vice-versa.

For the final draft, we presented to everybody for feedback.

My final draft

Hello. I’m David, a visual artist. Amongst other things, I make sculptures, but not from wood or stone, but from fiber.

What I am going to talk about is simulating fiber art on the computer, why this is useful, and some of the challenges encountered.

Fiber sculptures are time consuming to make. Before committing I want to simulating them in digital world before making in the physical world. Its useful to prototype before committing scarce materials and time.

Using Adobe Illustrator I have prototyped a working methodology, but there are a few challenges. Illustrator was unable to render some images as they are “too complex”. I have had to work around these by simplifying the underlying framework.

To summarize, I’ve made a start at simulating fiber sculptures (which isn’t a common practice), hit a few brick walls with Illustrator which I’ve managed to work through, and am continuing this exploration.

Thanks for listening. And don’t forget: buy my art!

Thoughts

This was an interesting exercise, and everybody made tangible improvements with each draft. Having a structure to work with clearly helps.

The online sessions are usually text only, so it was good to make video and audio contact too.

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