How to use audio-visual presentations for study and research – Part 2

This is the second part of our post on using audio-visual formats in your work, following part one last week.  Continuing the extract from Studying and Researching with Social Media, Megan Poore discusses how to develop appropriate style and format with your AV presentations, and shares one of the activities from her book on analysing an AV format. 

You can read the first part of this post, which introduces types of AV presentations and typical tasks you may be set, here http://studyingwithsocialmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/how-to-use-audio-visual-presentations.html

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SUCCESSFUL ENGAGEMENT WITH AV PRESENTATIONS

Depending on your viewpoint, it can be exciting, daunting, or confusing to have to produce an AV presentation for class. In any case, you will be most successful if you can perform according to the following advice.

Style and tone

Style refers to the forms and techniques of communication that you choose to convey a message; tone means the ‘mood’ you adopt to convey that message. With written work, style and tone are usually proscribed by ‘genre’ conven­tions; that is, blog posts must sound like blog posts, essays must sound like essays, and reports must sound like reports. AV presentations, on the other hand, often give you greater flexibility when it comes to choosing the style and tone you will use to get your point across.

It is important that your style and tone should be natural and not forced: if you feel uncomfortable with a more ‘relaxed’ design, then aim instead for a strategy involving a ‘Standard English’ approach. With all this said, it is still really important that you check with your lecturer to see what are the limits to the style and tone they will accept for AV assignments.

Visual and auditory ‘grammar’

Grammar comprises the systems and structures of language that help us communicate effectively. Mostly, we use the term ‘grammar’ to refer to the written word, but the notion of grammar can also be applied to auditory and visual forms of communication, in which both sound and vision have their own ‘language’ – a language that needs to be structured and presented in ways that make sense and that can be easily decoded by listeners and view­ers.

So, a highly developed visual grammar will communicate a message using everything from line, form, surface, size, colour, position, spacing, rota­tion, mirroring, inversion, movement, dimension, perspective, depth, juxta­position, angle, focus, texture, background, foreground, scale, weight, and the many other elements that constitute visual design. A highly developed audi­tory grammar communicates using elements such as tempo, speed, pitch, tone, background, modulation, volume, silences, fill-ins, sound effects, music, rate of delivery, slow and fast fades, truncation, and echo.

Creativity and format

AV assignments give you the opportunity to show that you can do more than just write. In fact, the level of creativity allowed to you in producing an AV presentation can be quite high and you might very well have the leeway to record real or imaginary interviews, produce mini-documentaries, gather vox pops, add sound and visual effects, or assemble an animation. Before embark­ing on a creative response, however, check with your lecturer to be sure that you have the freedom to do something different or original with your presen­tation. Give them a sense of what you are thinking of doing and ask them 1) whether or not they think it will work, and 2) for any suggestions they might have in terms of content, format, or traps to avoid.

Content and structure

Getting content and structure to come together to form a coherent whole is vital if you are to effectively communicate using any audio-visual medium. This is, of course, the same for a written piece of work, but, arguably, more is at stake with AV presentations because your audience doesn’t have the benefit of being able to skim your work to get a sense of its overall quality before scrutinising it in more detail: once someone has hit ‘play’ they are pretty much committed. Thus, making the right choices at the planning stage is essential if you are to engross your audience.

Content

In choosing your content ask yourself:

·         What outcome do I want?

·         What do I want to convince my audience of?

·         What is the most effective evidence I can marshal to support my main points and how can I best present it?

You may not be limited to ‘the literature’ in an AV presentation: images, sounds, video, animation, could all be acceptable. Your content for any AV presentation needs to be not only relevant but also engaging.

Structure

Any form of academic communication, whether it be written, visual, or auditory, needs to be competently structured if your audience is to follow your argument. But ensuring that you have an adequate structure is perhaps even more important for an AV presentation than it is for an essay or report – if the structure of a written piece at any point breaks down, then the reader can always flick back and forth and try to establish how your argument hangs together; this isn’t so easy with AV presentations. So, introduce your topic properly, allowing your audience to orient themselves to what is coming up in terms of argument, and subject matter, present your points logically, and end with a clear and concise summary and/or discussion of the implications of what you have presented.

ACTIVITY: Analyse documentary audio

Planning to create an audio presentation?  Follow Megan’s instructions to critically analyse some existing podcasts before applying to your own work.

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Text and activity extracted from Studying and Researching with Social Media by Megan Poore.