I’m finally starting to gear up for my two OSCON talks. This is why I found this article about how Al Gore used Keynote to create his movie interesting.

As many of you know, I love this program. I had Caitlin experiment with using this program to make her website, which is sort of like the way Al Gore used it in the movie. I actually think that maybe Keynote will make a good storyboarding device.

One interesting thing is how Al Gore keeps a “a genome of all his master slide” in a Keynote file which he customizes for the talk he is going to give. (This is probably a bad term for it since “master slide” already has meaning in Keynote.)

The few times I’ve given a talk multiple times, I’ve duplicated the file and modified. This is less efficient so I’ll have to steal that idea.

So even though I don’t do that, I found it is very useful to collapse/skip slides in your talk to customize it for time (While sometimes this means the time of the talk, usually the time here is the time I’ve had to finish up my talk and just run out of). I also always create a single skipped slide at the very beginning of the talk of elements that I’ll be using multiple times but can’t fit on the master slide.

Another interesting thing is that Keynote now supports wide-screen and high definition. I’ll have to bring myself up to speed on that.

Too bad I won’t watch this movie until it comes out on DVD. I bet there are some presentation tips I could get from the movie itself.