3 Minute TED Talk analysis

Two of the most interesting presentation styles I have seen while watching TED talks were the styles from the talks “A TED speaker’s worst nightmare” and “Rives: A story of mixed emoticons.”  Most talks involve a speaker standing up at the stage and talking about an issue that is important to them.  While these are very interesting, the style in which they present is nothing like the ones used by the speakers in “A TED speaker’s worst nightmare” and “Rives: A story of mixed emoticons.”  Instead of a traditional speech, they use completely unorthodox styles in order to translate their point to the audience. 

In “A TED speaker’s worst nightmare”, the speaker starts out pretending to give a normal, academic speech but he is cut off when his equipment starts to malfunction.  After several awkward moments with the audience people in the audience start twirling colorful umbrellas, dancers in morph suits come out, and it is clear that the speakers point all along was to create a dance instead of a speech.  While the speaker obviously had the dance planned, I think that the audience can take from the talk that if something doesn’t go according to plan you just have to make adjustments and keep going.  I think that his presentation style was effective for making this point.  Since he started out with his equipment breaking, the audience had to be feeling sorry for him and thinking about how awkward the rest of the speech is going to be.  He then starts the dance routine and the crowd no longer is thinking about how awkward the speech might be, but rather how he did a great job of turning something bad into something good.  While this style was definitely different, it was also a creative way to get his point across. 

The other TED talk I thought had an interesting presentation style was “Rives: A story of mixed emoticons.”  This was one of my favorite TED talks that I have seen because of the presentation style.  The speaker uses everyday emoticons to create a story of a boy mustering up the courage to ask out a pretty girl.  She says no, but the story was still cool.  The way he constantly referred to the graphic of his story on the screen was very effective.  It made it easier to follow along since the speaker was talking rather quickly.  Another thing that the speaker did in his presentation was he zoomed in on each picture as they were told in the story.  This made his initial big picture of lots of random pictures much easier to understand.  His story of the boy was a little sad, but the way he presented it with the emoticons was very effective.  His story was probably one of my favorite TED talks that I have watched because of the different way he was able to use emoticons to animate the story that he told.