The Making of Sticky Presentations™
(the book)

Red and green apples

Apples are great to illustrate simplicity. I wanted images of apples photographed at different angles to create sample slides with varied perspectives. I guess I also have to eat my apples to create the effects that I wanted. I recalled that the sky suddenly dimmed and the sunlight coming in from the window where I was doing the shoot was not bright enough. I had to move my setup to another part of my house where I can get more light.

Quad-deck sandwich

I didn't know making multi-deck sandwiches were so difficult. It's actually more than just stacking the bread and ingredients. Took me a while to stack those items as they kept falling. I also realised that making the sandwich for eating is different from making it for a photo shoot. I had fresh hot scrambled eggs, cold ham, lettuce, and tomato which didn't go quite well. The steam from the hot eggs and moisture from the cold ingredients made the bread soggy.

The photos from the first take didn't turn out quite good. A few days later I had to do another take, repeating the whole sandwich making process again. And again I had the giant sandwich for lunch. It was a good thing my daughter helped me with half of the sandwich.

The passion story

One of the key ingredient to delivering insanely great presentations is passion. I searched for stories and quotes from people who have done crazy things. I found two great stories. The inline skater who skated down the roller coaster track at 90 kmph and a famous BASE jumper who has done close to 2000 BASE jumps and 7000 skydives.

Douggs responded to my request with enthusiasm. He is excited to be mentioned and has kindly allowed me to use his quote and his amazing BASE jump photos in this book. You can read more about Chris ‘Douggs’ McDougall from his website at basedreams.com.

Little squirrel

After spending so much time in this book, my thoughts were blinded by my preference and I stop thinking objectively. Some time back I took some interesting photos of squirrels during my visit to St. Edwards University in Texas. I initially used some of these in the book. I am not quite sure why I thought it fitted, but I just wanted them to be there.

The initial draft of this book went out to a few of my friends. They came back with very strong objections about squirrels. "What was wrong with squirrels?", I remarked. I was kind of defensive at first but then after thinking about it, I agreed. Squirrels are kind of weak and doesn't quite go well in creating stickiness in the context that I was intending to use it for. Well, the squirrels did not make it into this book except for one that I took during breakfast at Sentosa.

Magic hands

I have this image that I created for the presentation that I use for my workshop. Yes, the one that you see on the right. A floating blue puzzle trying to find its place, illustrating transitions of slides. To make the image a little more interesting, I thought I would be nice to have a magician's hands manipulating the puzzle. (Move cursor/pointer over the puzzle)

I wanted to borrow my twelve-year old daughter's hands for this, but her hands are a little too tinny. My hands were used instead and she took the shots of my hands using my semi-pro Canon 450D SLR camera.

The library

I love this image of the library. It's such a classic combination of the traditional library that we all know with the modern cyber way of searching for information. There isn't a much better way of illustrating how many of us, including me, are researching information today. (Move cursor/pointer over the image)

The library image was taken from a stock photo library. I had to photograph my daughter's hand holding a mouse. This is a tough one as the angle and perspective of the hand holding mouse must be in-line with the image of the library for it to look real. In Sticky words, it must be Persuasive.

Birds vs flowers

Here is another case where there was war over which to use. And the birds lost. During my trip to Sydney early 2008, I shot a couple of very interesting closeup photos of birds in flight.

My idea was to use these photos in the page where I talk about exploring and seeing things in a different perspective. Thus, showing a bird flying high and having a bird's-eye view. The next 2 pages will then illustrate how different positioning of image and text can make a difference in the effectiveness of presentation design using birds as the subject of focus. However, many didn't think that the photo has impact and that I should use a photo of an eagle instead.

A week later I met a new friend whom I shared this with. She too felt that birds are not appropriate. Excitedly she suggested that I should use flowers instead. Giving me her animated views on how flowers can be made interesting. Guess I bought her idea and spent half a day at the Singapore Botanic Gardens shooting orchids.

Inspiration

Starbucks is one of those cafe that I love. It's where I get my inspiration to do creative work. One day, as I was sitting at a corner table in Starbucks at East Point having my breakfast, it came to me that the setup was perfect for me to include in this book. I only had my compact digital camera with me that day. How can I get the whole cafe in the picture? Even if I had my SLR camera with me, I do not have a super wide angle lens that can capture the whole cafe. So, I decided to let my MacBook do the magic.

Sitting at where my MacBook was, I took 11 shots of the cafe panning from left to right. Immediately I uploaded it onto my MacBook and it's done. Then I realised that there was a problem. I was not in the picture. Somehow I needed to digitally include me in this amazing panoramic shot.

On a separate occasion I got a friend to help take a photo of me standing against a white wall looking back at the camera. Again my MacBook did all the magic. Sound simple? Actually not. It was quite painful but it felt great when everything worked out the way I wanted.