Presenting My Story and Treatment from 8,000 Miles Away: Planning and Testing

Artheus, my workhorse MBP

Yesterday, I woke up quite early with Internet as breakfast. I actually slept quite late, just a few hours before, but I think it has something to do with the music playing on the background that woke me up in no time. After falling asleep with my laptop on my bed (it was a productively tiring work night as usual), The LOTR 1 soundtrack has been looping in my iPod and it's not really a "pro-sleeping soundtrack."

Anyway, I think it was about 10pm or so in Manila. And had to talk to Ramon for the pitching session for the stories.

I have to present my project as well. But obviously, I can't be there until the last quarter of 2011. I'm currently in the U.S. and the most I can do is to provide all the materials to people in Manila. I got a spoonfeeding type of Keynote presentation with PDF backup and video peg for the animation also sent  separately so all materials are already there prior to the Saturday session.

A slide from my Keynote presentation exported in PDF format (backup copy I sent to people in Manila)

I could have sent a representative from my creative team already, but decided not to first. I thought it would be better to have somebody from my team once we "officially start," with their contracts on hand. There are other options anyway. I'm looking for ways to present, that for the first ever pitching and presentation about my plans for my film, I'm taking charge.

Initially, Ramon will be my "proxy." He has the materials from me and he considerably knows my story. We actually developed it while riding the plane back to Manila from our animation workshop in Aklan last March.

So Ramon was online that morning. Good! So it's time to talk about how the presentation will go. Prior to that, we were looking for ways to make an online presentation possible. Suggestions included Skype, Yahoo Messenger, Facetime, Google Wave, the Share button in Keynote, among others. Apparently, only one option seemed appropriate: Apple's iChat.

Awesome MBP!!!

Since we both have Macs, we started exploring the program. In a breeze, my screen got shared to his screen from 8,000 miles away! Awesome! Successful test! Technology is so cool!!!  Best of all... it's free!! It's as simple as opening iChat in the two Macs. =D

His laptop is going to be an extension of my laptop. Then his laptop will connect to the projector and an external speaker for better audio from the conference room where the presentation will be done in the Philippines.

The plan is to also have one of the many laptops during the presentation to be used for Skype or YM. I'll be there via video conference. That laptop will just be beside Mon's Mac and the projector so people can see my face and I can see them. It helps, too, that the conference room's table was long and rectangular (with a vertical orientation from the projection wall) -- making me have a good view of people there during the video conference. They see me, I see them!

This is my first time to do a professional presentation from thousands of miles away. Really cool. Let's see what happens... session starts in about 12 hours from now. It's 2pm, Saturday, Philippine time, which is also 11pm, Friday, Pacific Standard Time.