 I'm Scott. And we're the host of Geek Nights coming to you live through telepresence. We're not live at all. So, Anime Boston, we were jerks and we decided to go to PAX instead. Well, not instead because we will be here at Anime Boston in I think the Constitution Room for two actual live panels tomorrow. We're doing motivational anime and we're doing diamonds in the rough. But right now, as you are watching us speak to you, if you haven't left the room already, which in case you're smart, good job. We are probably playing some mad board games and shit over at PAX. But we said, hey, we said we would do a panel and it got scheduled at a bad time. What can we do? I know, let's record the panel on video and send it over and be really unprofessional and sort of jerky. Now, we have sent supposedly a goon, possibly multiple goons who are out here presenting. They might have introduced this video. You must berate them. Ha ha ha. Those guys tell nothing but lies. Yes. Whoever they are or girls because we don't know who they are as of when we recorded this. No, we don't. But anyway, this is the how to run a panel panel for Anime Boston 2012. You hesitated there, like you weren't sure. Cause I'm not there right now. So it's a little, even when I'm there, you know, how you supposed to remember this. So here's the deal. We are at least relatively well known for doing good panels, good workshops, lectures, things. We've been doing this for, I don't know, since 2002, so a decade. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So, you know, we've done a lot of panels, you know, and because we have done so many and we're so consistent over so many years, that's why they'll, you know, give us some slack if we say, hey, we can't show up. Let's send you a video instead. Ha ha ha. You know, hmm, I don't know. Is that, do we need more for the intro? So step one. Ha ha ha. Maybe I'll make an action too. Cause I felt like it was like end of intro already. It was. It's like we're going into the panel because we don't know what else to do. All right. I know, I'll do a funny bit here. So how to run a panel? Step one, if you're not live, you can totally edit out when you fuck up. But you usually don't need to because in person, one thing to remember, because a lot of you might be thinking you want to run a panel, you want to run a lecture, a workshop, but you might be nervous. You might think you get stage fright. I'll tell you one thing. It is way harder to do it here when there's nobody watching than it is if we're actually in that room because we're getting no feedback. There is a soulless camera, a red dot that I'm staring at. So I can't tell if a joke is funny. I mean, maybe if we were way awesome, we had like video staff, we could gauge the cameraman's reaction, which would be pretty great, but we don't. So we're just looking at a camera with a red dot and that red dot does not tell us anything about whether we're doing a good job or not. My point, however, is that you don't need to be nervous. I mean, you've seen panels at conventions, anime cons, video game cons, they're usually pretty terrible. So if you can at least be that much above terrible, people will remember you as legends. And not only that, right? But people always have this stage fright, like they're nervous. Like, what is really, what is going to happen? People are not going to boo you. You know, the worst. We've been booed. We've been booed. Okay, so they boo you. So what? Well, then you die. Oh yeah. I forgot you were allergic to booze. Yeah. You know, it's like, what's actually gonna happen to you, right? As long as you're not like completely insane and do stupid things, right? If you just get, and the other thing is that it's sort of one of those self-fulfilling prophecies, right? If you are nervous, then you're gonna get up there and be all like, and that's going to cause badness. Your nervousness brought about the thing that you were worried about happening because you had the nervousness. Self-fulfilling prophecy. We said it already. So if you don't have the nervousness and you just go up there and just start talking, then you're gonna be A-okay. So why do a panel at a convention? Well, one, like we said, I don't think I've paid for attendance at any convention since like 2002. Yeah, not a lot of paying going on. Yeah. Free badges galore. We're here free. We're at PAX free. We're everywhere free. So if nothing else, if you are motivated by a desire to get into conventions for free, if you do good content, they will usually let you in for free. Yeah, but then again, you know, we're not guests, we're just panelists, so it's not like we get free hotels. Yeah. You know, but hey, you take what you can get, right? No, I would say that shouldn't be your sole motivation because if all you want is to get in free, there are better ways to do that. Badge forgery. Totally works most of the time. Make sure you do a good job though. But two, you're here at the Hotter on a Panel panel. So I assume you've got some idea. Like there's some- I assume you're still here. I'm watching some video. Raise your hand if you're still here. Oh, look at all those hands. Oh shit. It was like a 10,000 hands. I know, right? So you have something you want to say. Like you really want to talk about how Fluttershy is the best pony or how Sephiroth wasn't really a man and you have this complex argument about like why this is the case. Utana was really about ice cream. Whatever it is you have to say, you want to say it. So the first thing you would think about if you're submitting a panel or a lecture or a workshop is what are you doing? They're not panels. The fact that we call these things panels at every convention is a huge problem because the vast majority of what you see are not panels. That's right, a panel is when you have a panel as in a bunch of people who are all knowledgeable on a particular topic or maybe have differing opinions about a particular topic and there may or may not be a moderator who asks them questions or they could take questions with the audience or whatever and they all discuss this particular thing that is a panel. What you are watching now is called a panel at a convention because of the panel's department or whatever but actually this is a lecture, right? Or perhaps a presentation. Yes, we're just talking to you without stopping and telling you things that we know and educating. The weekend before anime Boston. Right, we're educating and entertaining and informing all at once. I don't know about entertaining. Depends on your opinion. The viewer might disagree. I think so. I definitely wouldn't be watching this if I were you. So what we're talking about right now are presentations or lectures. We'll talk about panels in a bit because panels are a very different beast and even though most of you don't do them you might want to do one and the way you do them is so different that they're almost completely different topics. So what are the panel killers? I mean, you've seen a lot of shit panels. Panel killer number one is when they waste half the time of the panel with some technological fail of some kind. They can't get the projector to work. Their laptop doesn't do the thing. They don't have the wire to hook up the audio thingy and some of those might be, you know you might try to blame it on the convention but the fact is we go to so many conventions you cannot assume the convention will have anything good. You pretend before you even leave your house just pretend you got an email that says everything at the convention is broken, right? If you can bring your own projector. I mean, I don't go that far. But, you know, you should have multiple laptops have your presentation on multiple USB sticks and multiple formats with all kinds of cables and batteries and power strips. And, you know, we have like so many backup things it's unbelievable. We cannot possibly fail, you know any technological sort of thing because we have so much backup stuff. If the convention center itself burned down and the city itself ceased to function so where we couldn't even get into the city well then we do this from home and send the video out. So we start the company. Yeah, you know, make sure that no matter what you have technology, you have backup technology and you've tested it before you left your house and that it works and that you know how to do it, right? Cause too many people show up and they don't know how to make their own stuff work and half the panel is spent sitting there doing nothing. And you know what? That's even worse than watching a video panel. Now too, the biggest thing you can do to ruin a panel is to have more than one or two people up there on stage. Now again, lecture, not panel. We gotta stop using the colloquial nomenclature. A panel can have 10 people on it and be fine because there's a moderator. A lecture, if there's more than two or three people on that stage when you walk into the room, walk out, it's probably going to be terrible. Or it's going to be one of those sort of non lectures, like, you know, one of those like court case kind of things. Yeah, but again, that's a whole different bargain. Then we're not covering that. So if you have a presentation, why do you need 10 people on stage? How much are all those people actually contributing? They were just trying to get more free badges, you know it, you know it. That's why at Techoneticown we cut it down to we only give, I think, two badges per panel now. That's right, we're going to be hardcore about it too. Yeah. So if you've got something to say and you have some idiot friends who want a free badge and say, hey, put me on your panel, tell them no, make them do their own goddamn panel. That's right. And then the convention will have more panels. It wouldn't have to put a video panel in some room because they weren't. So three, now notice we're standing. Not in, we don't have a studio or anything. This is just my living room. But we're standing. How many, you go to most panels and the guys are all kind of sitting. Well, because what they do is you go to these conventions and most of them are in hotels or convention centers and the standard setup is to have a stage that's elevated with a long table with chairs behind it and then microphones on the table, which sort of, you know, sort of gives a suggestion to the presenter that you were supposed to sit in one of those chairs behind the table talking into the microphone. And if you're doing a panel, then that is sort of a good idea. But if you're giving a lecture, that's not really the greatest idea, right? What you want to do is you want to stand up, ask the staff and be nice to the staff because they're, you know, they're super helpful. Hey guys. You should never mistreat them. Maybe he's on this side. What's up, awesome staff guy, in case you're on that side. You should always be nice to them and thank them and be, you know, bring them cupcakes or beer, whatever they want, right? And basically, right, ask them, hey, can I get some wireless microphones? Hey. No, you might think, oh, why would I ask about that? This sucks. You don't want to have to deal with this. Now, speak, we'll talk about this in a second, but if they don't have any wireless mics, just rollin' this up, just pull the microphone out of whatever it's on, wrap it around yourself in some fashion and just stand there. That's right. And you know, you can do a little walk around. Little walk around situation. Don't tangle up. Right, yeah, you got them all in if you're wireless, you won't be tangling. Yup, nope. Right, and get in front of that table so people can see, you know, you can get your whole body out there, you know, if you can get in front of the table. Now, the biggest reason to do this, this is so much more dynamic. You walk into a panel and you see a guy kind of droning on, sitting down in front of a microphone, the audience just sitting there not moving. You want to engage. All right, look at the, look at people who do a lot of public speaking, right? Steve Jobs when he lived, he didn't go behind a podium or a table. He stood there, right? He had a lavalier, I think. He wasn't holding a microphone, but he stood and he walked around the stage, right? What are those like evangelical guys on TV or like all those, you know, healing guys you see? They're always standing and walking around or those guys who are trying, you know, on infomercials, they're always standing, right? Cause that's how you get energy into the peoples. Now you'll see us break this rule. Usually Sunday morning panels have like mag fast. Well, you know, because we've done this so much, right? Do as we say, don't do as we do. It's all, it's the same as true in so many professions, right? A good example is music composition. You know, a long time ago I studied music composition. There is a list of rules for like, for example, four part harmony, like follow these rules and music will come out. You cannot follow this kind of note with this kind of note or this chord with this chord. If you follow the rules, even if you don't even understand what music is, pleasant sounding music comes out. Now a great composer breaks all of those rules, but he understands why he's breaking each one and pulls it off correctly. Until you understand why the rules are there, you cannot get away with breaking them. Yeah, it's like when you're a noob, you have to follow the book exactly, right? Do what the textbook tells you to. The masters never do what the textbook tells them to, right, but you can't teach someone that. You have to have the textbook skill first and then you can have the mastery skill. So, you know, when we're break, when you know, when you're watching this panel, whatever we tell you to do is what you should do. You should not just try to copy us because we're gonna break all kinds of rules, like put our hand in our pocket, we're slouching, doing all kinds of bad stuff, right? Don't do that. But in terms of microphone, you'll see a lot of novice panelists, if they try to stand up, they're gonna hold the microphone like this. No one can see your face if you're doing this. Yup. That's a bad idea. Also, you can overload the mic because usually the mics are wired way hot because most people are really quiet at conventions. Won't get into why, but you've seen it. They're quiet. Learn how to use the microphone properly, right? And, you know, maybe you, how are you gonna learn, right? You can get a microphone and test it out at your house, plug it into your computer, try it out, you know, fiddle with the volume settings. And remember, the staff people there are also, they're gonna, you know, move the levels around on the mixer board to help you out if you're in a good convention that has that kind of activity. If not, you have to learn over and learn how to go and, you know, figure out which slider to move to do it yourself. Now, little kind of, we'll talk a little bit about sort of deep or maybe non-obvious techniques, you know, poise and presence and all that, but the biggest one, since we're talking about microphones, there's probably some big speakers on either side of the stage. You might think, all right, I'm gonna walk around, everything's good. The moment that microphone passes by the front of one of those speakers, it's over. Right, do not do that, right? It's so stereotypical, the feedback, right? And if you don't know, that happens because sound comes out of the speaker into the microphone, gets amplified at the amplifier, comes back out of the speaker, goes into the microphone again, and keeps getting amplified. Yo, dawg, I heard you like feedback, so. Right, so it goes, eh, right, that's what happens, which is why you never wanna have the microphone, this noise from the speaker entering the microphone. Do not do it, even once is very, very bad. Do not do it, because then you look like an unprofessional schmuck who's never had a microphone in your life. Yup, now you might, it's easy to forget, for example, if they do give you a wireless mic, you might forget and walk right in front of that speaker. It's gotta have your hand right on the mute button or the cough button, or in the very least, if you have to walk in front of the speaker, most microphones, especially conventions, are an SM57 or an SM58, you don't need to know. It's an SM57. This is also an SM57. The thing to remember is that those are cardioids, meaning the directionality of the microphone matters. See if I point it away, I get quiet, and then I get loud again. It's because it gets more sound from the front than the back, so if we walk in by a speaker and the speaker's here. Oh, good idea. Yeah. As long as you don't point the microphone directly at the speaker, you're probably gonna be okay. Probably. So, another guy, did you just stay on stage? Don't get off the stage unless you really have to. Especially not, I mean, maybe you can get off, but don't bring the microphone with you. So, one thing that people really don't pay attention to is the unspoken and the unseen. Well, it is seen, but it's not consciously seen, it's subconsciously seen. And that is how you present yourself with your body language. And this is the most difficult thing to master because you're mostly thinking about what words are coming out of your mouth. It's very hard to simultaneously think about what position your body's in. If you notice, we're not even experts on this, at least not when we're not trying so hard. Well, there's some old famous videos when we were not too good at the camera stuff where whenever I was talking, Scott was hypnototing, not at the camera, but off from the camera. Or people would be like picking the nose up here. You notice I have my hand in my pocket. I'm sort of slouching, sort of looking off in the distance. You'll see when I have a clicker, I tend to be like flicking the clicker, like click, click, like I'm throwing it around in my hand while I'm going. Fidgeting, bite your nails. Oh, the heater came on, let me turn that off. Keep going. Turn the heater on and off. Look at this unprofessional bullshit. Kind of not looking at anybody, just sort of mumbling. So if it's just you, it's easy. Always be looking at the audience and look at different parts of the audience. Now, if you don't need, you know, a lot of times it's hard to look people in the face. Don't make eye contact, if you're nervous, that'll mess you up. Look at their foreheads or just look at, pick like three places in the room and alternate between them just as you think. Usually there'll be things you can look at, like staff table, water cooler. Fat guy. Door, fat guy, whatever. You know, just keep looking around. Now, you don't want to be totally stiff. Like don't just stand there doing nothing the whole time because then it looks really awkward. Right, you gotta move a little bit. I'm a little fluid. I'm kind of walking around. Right, a little bit. You can shift from left to right. You can do the shift in microphone. I do the backhand pocket occasionally. Right, do a little pocket situation. But one person's easy. Just look around the room, look at the audience, engage and be kind of fluid. Two people is tricky because when I'm talking, what's Scott supposed to do? He can look at you, he can look at me. And the trick is try to pretend it's a natural conversation, even though it isn't. It's a fake conversation. Act like it's a real conversation. And try to do things that are appropriate. Like if the other person makes a funny joke, you can laugh. Ah. You know, if the other person's like to the audience, you can be like, hmm, hmm, you know. Just sort of add your body language to the feeling of whatever the other person's doing and then make sure you come in at the right time. And the only way to come in at the right time is to have a good repertoire with that person with years of experience. I believe you mean rapport. Yeah, same thing. We could edit that out, but because we're semi-live, we won't. We don't give a shit. You know, we talked about rollins in the microphone. If you're holding the microphone, especially at cons, they might have a cheap cable. All that means is the Henry Rollins style, you want to wrap that cable a little bit around your hand to give you something to grip and to make sure that if you pull it too hard, you're not going to mess up the microphone or pull this out of the bottom here. That's right. Other than that, you know, don't put your hands in your pockets, like especially front pocket. Kind of keep them out. Kind of, you know, just be semi-aggressive. Don't sit, like we said. Yeah. You definitely want to keep your head up, right? Don't only have your head down. Don't be looking at the ceiling, right? Don't look at your slides. Absolutely do not look at your slides. The moment you turn around and start reading what's on a slide. Now you could, if you have a graphic or some sort of chart, go with the laser pointer. Now let's look at this graphic. You can see here, I've got a better example. You can see here in Manhattan. Now look, see that building right there? I don't know what it's called. Nor do I know that one, but I'm interacting with this graph. I'm doing something. Yeah. As opposed to, so the first bullet point on this slide says Naruto is awesome. That's because Naruto is awesome. Now the second bullet point says that Bleach is not awesome. That's because Bleach is not awesome. Don't do that. Don't do that. Donnie don't doesn't do. Except Donnie don't does do that, but don't do that. Don't do what Donnie don't does. Because he's Donnie don't. You shouldn't don't do what he do. Now, if you really want to get good at this, what you've got to do, though it's going to be painful, is get a friend, even if it's on their cell phone, at least parts of the panels you do initially. It's really awkward to watch yourself performing the first few times until you get the hang of it. It's awkward to do the mirror thing. It's awkward to video yourself and then watch yourself on YouTube. It's awkward to do whatever, but you got to do it anyway. Just do it. Good God, you should see 10 years ago the panels we were doing at like Otacon. We're still not even that great. No. But we're great enough to tell you what to do because we're better than that. We're better than nothing, right? We're not good enough to be here in person. If we did even one panel, we'd be qualified to tell you what to do if you've done zero. If you haven't done zero, why are you here? You may notice the scene has changed with the power of editing. Okay. Time has passed. So anyway, when you're trying to, you're going to do this panel or this lecture, what do you do it on? You need to come up with something, right? And maybe you just have a favorite anime or favorite video game or something you want to do it on, right? Well, you could. You could just be like, hey, I'm going to do Madoka, the panel. That's cool, but is it really that exciting? What's that going to be? What are you going to say? I mean, are you just going to talk about who the characters are? Explain what Madoka is without any sort of like other context. Are you just trying to like sell people on the show? Like what, you had to have some specific thing to go on. You need to narrow your idea. At the same time, right? You need to be incredibly knowledgeable about this idea. You can't just go and do a panel about something you know nothing about, right? What do you know the hell a lot about, right? There must be some something out there that you have studied fricking crazily. Like you know more about it than anyone else. Like you've watched Ice Shield 21 a thousand times. You've read the whole manga twice. You've read all the Wikipedia's about it and you've gone to every fan site. Like you are that expert, right? And when you're the expert on something, you probably care about that something, right? If you really, you know, you walk up to someone at a convention just in the hallway and maybe they're wearing a cosplay of a thing you like. If you really like that thing, maybe it's Pokemon, right? If you're a Pokemon fan, you can just talk about Pokemon for hours easily without even having to think or write or prepare. We did a semi-infamous panel at an Otacon many years ago. We did like five panels that year and they needed another one because a bunch of people had bailed on them. So we agreed at the last minute, like at the con, like, all right, we'll do one on advanced wars. We stuck it into the schedule. We just happened to know a lot about advanced wars. And we sat there with no planning and for an hour talked about advanced wars and I think the people in the audience thought we made advanced wars. Some of them did, I don't know. Yeah, that's a separate discussion but one thing to ease your possible stage fright. On a stage, people think you're an expert even if you're not. They will lend a lot more credence to your opinions than they might if they're just talking to you in line. Also, here's a secret, no insult to you. Actually, yes, an insult to some of you, right? Is that people in the audience at panels tend not to actually know very much in general, right? I mean, everyone has something they know about but I've been to panels like one guy did a Nintendo panel at a convention I was at once. It was the time the Wii was coming out and people were asking him like, when does the Wii come out? What are the launch games? And he knew those things and I knew those things as we read blogs on the internet that tell us what those things are but most of the people had no idea. They don't read the internet every day. They don't follow game news. So they didn't know any of this stuff. So now you not only are you on a stage and holding a microphone which gives you some air of authority but because you're knowledgeable now you have this like real authority. People like, you know, they totally believed you was like from Nintendo. He's like, I don't work for Nintendo. I'm just some guy. He was no different than me. Yeah. When they asked me when advance wars, whatever, like three was coming out I was tempted to just give him a date. Right. They would have believed it too. So, but at the same time remember this, this could be dangerous and you need to be responsible, right? Don't just go telling people BS, right? Because you're in this position of authority, you know, you can cause some damage by saying the wrong thing. So always, you know, be very careful and fact check your stuff. But the point of all this is that especially if you haven't done panels and lectures before, start with something you already know a lot about. I mean, we didn't have to prepare to talk about how to run panels. It's been a decade plus, but we do do some lectures where we don't know a lot about the topic. Like we were researching right now for packs on like the monetization models of games. And while we know a lot about that we had to do a lot of research too. But if you're not already comfortable with public speaking, you're not already able to kind of off the cusp deal with the crowd and, you know, do this kind of thing, then you're not prepared to do research on something you don't know about and to present on it at the same time. That's right. You got to remove one of those factors for your first few efforts. Okay, so now you've decided on your topic, right? You need to write a title and description to go in the con book, right? We run the panels and workshops department at Kineticon and have for many years. We've been panelists forever. We work with people who run, like Lou is a good friend of ours. He runs panels here at Anime Boston. Okay, he'll pack same deal. Like, we know these people. We all professionally agree on one thing. Well, a couple of things. One, most of the submissions we get are awful, both in terms of title and description. And two, most of you out there, nobody reads the description in the book. A few people read the descriptions. A few people will read and see who is doing the panel because maybe they're a big fan of us or no one's a fan of us. But then they're gonna look. That guy is. They don't care what the panels are. They care. They want to see a particular person. They don't care what the person's talking about. And then, as most people, they just look at the overall schedule and they look at the titles. And not only are they only looking at the titles, they're looking at shortened versions of the titles, right? So you need to put incredible key words in that title that's gonna drag people in, right? For example, our first Oticon panel that was ours alone and not just like a real panel with other people on it was called Gekiga, putting the man back in manga. Now, if you know what Gekiga is, you expect a certain thing from that panel. That's right. Most people had no idea what that was. They saw putting the man back in manga and thought we were talking about Yaoi manga. So a whole bunch of Yaoi fan girls came in and- It doesn't, anything to get butts in the seats. If you do a good job, you can keep the butts in the seats no matter what you're talking about. They might've been kept in the seats out of horror as opposed to interest for that. It doesn't matter what you use to get the job done. So for example, good panel titles, anime you should see. People think, oh, there's anime I should see. I wonder what that's about. Dragon Ball sucks. Now you might not believe Dragon Ball sucks. I wouldn't want to do a panel that was about that but people see that title. They're gonna show up just to see what's going on. That's right. So for example, we did a, we do a panel. We've done it quite frequently about independent role-playing games. If we called it independent tabletop role-playing games, people probably wouldn't show up. Except for people who already know everything we're gonna say. That's right. But we call it beyond Dungeons and Dragons. People see that title. They know what Dungeons and Dragons is. And we're already disparaging in the title. A lot of people are fans of it and we're saying beyond. So beyond Dungeons and Dragons has so many implications, right? It's saying go past that, but it's also saying like maybe enhance that, you know? And that's a thing that they recognize. And if they're a D&D fan, they see that on the schedule, they're showing up. Now you want proof of how well this worked? It was our first Pax panel ever. And it filled the room. People lined up for hours to get in. Like we had to turn a lot of people away. And everyone in the audience was sitting there with like nerd rage just ready to go. They were like, who are these guys to talk about D&D? I'm gonna defend by the end. Like we got them. We tricked them in and then we sold them our goods. That's right. We ran that same panel at Otacon. A zillion times. Of all places, we ran it at Otacon in the biggest panel room. One year. And it filled the room. We had to turn people away. People were all standing in the back, sitting in the aisles. Animecon, talking about gaming, Dungeons and Dragons filled the room because the title was provocative. That's right. So title is the most important thing. Yeah, the description is basically just the final sell on the few people who care about that. Worry about your title. That's right. Now too, when you submit a panel, spell every word right. And you know, people, it's weird. In the animecon industry, well not industry, more so than other conventions, we found that there's this weird anti-professionalism. Like the word professional or industry, they're bad words. People are afraid of that. Now I can see why. You've been to professional panels at these cons. They suck usually. That's right. I mean, the Bandai guy or whatever isn't gonna answer any of your questions. They're gonna give corporate bullshit answers. They're gonna give away free crap. There's no reason to go to these things. Unless you really need the free crap. But like professionalism is often frowned upon and I don't understand why. Because if you act professionally, even if you are not a professional, people will treat you professionally, even if they are themselves not professionals. When we submitted our first panel to PAX, basically I submitted it like a resume, like I was applying for a job. Like dear sir, to home it may concern, I am so and so. I would like to do a panel at PAX about so and so. Here's my resume. Here are my credentials. I have run these events at other conventions in the past. I have lectured on this. I have a degree in this. I've studied game theory. Here are all the reasons why I think I'm the best candidate to do this panel. Here's what the panel's about. And here's why I wanna run it. Seems simple. If you can't even put that much effort in, then why should I go through the effort of reading your description, reading your submission, and then giving you an hour in front of the people who are paying to be at my convention? All right, now going around of professionalism, right? Let's talk about some of the unprofessional things people do. Mostly what I see them is pertaining to slides and presentations. Oh, not this stuff. Yeah, picking your nose, sure. But mostly when it comes to slides and presentations, I see the most unprofessional things, right? People will, they'll put up, you'll see their desktop, they'll set up their stuff way late. Make sure before anyone comes into the room, you've already got all the technology set up and your first slide is already on the screen. No one even knows what OS you have, right? Unless you have a Mac. But even then, you might be dual-booting with the boot camp. Yep, the rule of thumb. No one should ever see your desktop background. Now, we violate that rule. Many people violate it because you wanna show clips. And oftentimes it's not easy to integrate a clip with your slideshow. It's okay to minimize the slideshow and pull up a clip but you'd better have that clip edited down to the exact part you wanna show. Yeah, if you start scrubbing back and forth looking for the spot. Oh wait, no, it's a little forward, forget it. The moment you pull out a DVD, I want motion data. That's right. You could have the DVD preset, pause at the exact spot, ready to go in waiting. But. And then open it up and press play. That never works. Never works. DVD players will like go to sleep, they'll be all, it never works. It doesn't. If you're doing videos, you should have all the videos integrated into the presentation somehow. I mean, you could do the hacky thing of putting like videos directly in PowerPoint. It's kind of ghetto. You could try to put YouTube's in a Google presentation, got doc presentation. That really won't work because you can't rely on there being internet. Pretend there's no internet, right? Never rely on internet because you will not have it. Nope. Or it will be slow, I guarantee it. Pretend there is no internet. If you depend on internet, just might as well cancel your panel. And what you need to do is you need to get some sort of playlist in a video player or something configured, write some software. I wrote a tool that does this, actually in the web browser. We'll have the video embedded as HTML5 and then I will actually have a presentation clicker and in JavaScript it listens for the clicker and then we'll go to the next video and you push the button. Now the clicker is key. Buy one of those Logitech like mouse clickers for presentations. They're like between 40 and $70. They make you look so professional, so snappy. You're standing there, you're just like click. And they got laser pointers on them and they got timers, right? It'll buzz when you set it to buzz. Yeah, I have a- So now you know when your panel's about to end. So you're not sitting there like through the panel the whole time being like, ah, how much time do I have? What's going on? And you can, you want to get a nice big timer out on the table that you can see the audience can't see, you know that way you know how much time is left, but the buzzer is just as good. You're holding this clicker in your hand the whole time, you know. And then as time is running out, you feel it buzz and you know, oh, I got to wrap it up, you know. And that's super unprofessional. It's people going over the end of the time, right? It's like, dude, panel's over, get out for the next guy, right? You wanted the guy to get out for you, you got to get out for them. I don't care if you messed up your tech and you only finished half your panel because you wasted 30 minutes, you're done, get out. So in terms of slides themselves, everybody makes fun of PowerPoint and it's because people suck at making slides. Your slides should be an accompaniment. Well, in essence, they should not be the entire panel written out in text form. Yeah, if you need slides, I mean, some panels don't even need slides. You can just do video only. Some panels, you don't need anything. You just stand there and talk. I recommend always having slides. In the very least, you have an intro slide which says who you are, what the panel is, and maybe you have an outro slide, like here's my contact info, here's the website. We've done a few panels where there's only like four or five slides where it's just like, okay, here's the title of the panel, here's something to look at, here's a black slide just while we're talking and then here's a panel, there's a slide that has our URLs and our email addresses and stuff on it at the end. But when in doubt, the number of slides should be minimal. Every slide should serve a purpose. Maybe it's a joke. I mean, I have this picture of this train crashing that I use in a lot of panels. Almost every panel. I'll like cut, like I'll start me talking. In mid-sentence, I'll flip to that slide and the audience goes nuts because it's, you know, it's comedic timing. Slides should be minimal. One picture, one panel from a manga, a little caption. The moment you have more than like 10 words on a panel you've already screwed up. That's right. Also, the only kind of slides you should use are one title of text, you know, a bulleted list and don't animate each item of the bulleted list. No transitions ever. Just show the whole list at once. No animations, no transitions, no nonsense, no fancy background colors, no weird crazy patterns, right? Unless you're a professional graphic designer, in which case you can do it right, don't do anything fancy, right? Just stick with black on white or white on black and that's it. Now there are fancy things you can do that you could probably pull off really well. Like I've seen lectures where someone will have like 400 slides and he's clicking through really rapidly and they're kind of matching the cadence of what he's saying. That's a professional, that's not you. That's the kind of stuff where you sit and practice that in front of a mirror and a camera like a thousand times to pull it off once. When you level that, when you level up then you can try to do that high level stuff. For now, do not do, do not even try. So at the end of your panel or your lecture, we keep talking, you know, we keep messing it up because everyone messes it up. You should probably have some sort of thesis and you want to reiterate that at the end. Don't just like stop and trail off but stop your panel a few minutes before the end and kind of reiterate like, what's your point? I mean, the point of this panel is do panels at cons, learn how to do them well, be awesome. Yup, so you gotta, you come in with the intro, who you are, what the panel's about, then go into it. At the end, you gotta go out, again, the panel was about this, this is what I said, this is who I am and thank you. Now, Q and A. If you're gonna do Q and A. Now first, don't do Q and A. That's right, under no circumstances should you do Q and A unless you really, really, really want to. And know how to do it and are willing to do everything we're about to tell you. Right, so avoid Q and A. We do not do Q and A at 90% of the panels that we do. Sometimes we will lie and say we're going to and then we don't. And then we intentionally make sure the panel is so long that we do not have any Q and A. Now why, why don't we like Q and A? Because it is a waste of time because most people ask the same stupid questions and they're stupid questions, right? Now, when we do take questions, here are the things that we do to make sure it doesn't go as badly as it would otherwise, right? We put up this slide, right? So these are the, Scott's rules of question asking, right? Because it basically addresses all the typical problems that people have when they ask bad questions. Instead of asking a question, they'll just tell a story about themselves and they won't actually ask anything. Usually it's, oh, so you're an indie game developer. Well, I'm making a game that's about my little pony and Warhammer mashed up. It's called Warhammer 40K Pony. And I'm having a problem, you know, he's basically trying to sell his crap that he's making. And pretending it's a question. He's doing self promotion or he's telling a personal story or he's doing, you know, something that is not asking a question, right? Some people just go up and make a statement, right? And if you just want to say, hey, I like your stuff. Well, I mean, that's cool. There's nothing wrong with doing that. But Q and A is not the time to do that. There is a limited amount of time for Q and A. There are probably a lot of people who do want to ask questions. Maybe some of them are good, maybe. Maybe. And you're taking away time from them. You could just go and say that later after the panel, any other time. Or look it up on Google because most of the questions you're gonna ask have already been answered by most people, most presentations. Send the panelists an email or something, right? That's not the time, right? Also, people ask questions that aren't relevant to the panel, right? If we're doing a panel about how to run a panel panel, don't come up and ask a question about like, oh, you mentioned this anime, whatever. Shut up. That's not what this panel's about. Now, this isn't just anime cons. This is everywhere. For example, there's this famous lecture by Douglas Adams that we watched a while ago. And the point of it is that he gives this lecture that has nothing to do with his books, at least the books that people know him for. It's a lecture about conservation and animals and Madagascar and stuff. It's a great lecture. The first motherfucker who comes up and asks a question, asks him if he has his towel with him. Yeah, it's not relevant to what was just discussed. Don't ask it. Now, it is possible to ask the funny question or the question that may not be relevant, but you are not a professional comedian. In fact, almost no, it's one of those things. You've gotta know that you can pull it off. Okay, let's go over here. I'm gonna take turns, you ready? I guess. You're ready. Welcome to Action Castle. Small cottage. There is a fishing pole here. Exits are out. Is it our turn to say something? I don't understand. Is it our turn to say something? You're in the garden path. There is a rose bush here. There is a garden here. Exits are north, south, and east. I'm scared. I don't understand. I'm scared. Fishing pole. You are in a cottage. There is a fishing pole. Can't the fishing pole. There is a pole. Okay, good. I think it's out. A rose bush here. There is a cottage here. Exits are north, south, and east. What the? I go into the cottage. We in the cottage? Anime screening. Sometimes a guy'll say something even though you're supposed to be quiet and it's really funny and everybody laughs. You don't want to be the guy who sees that happen thinks I want to try that too and annoy everybody. That's right. If you don't think you can pull it off, don't pull the pin out of that grenade. Yeah. Other things that people mess up when asking questions, they ask questions. Even if they do ask an actual question, maybe they'll make it incredibly long asking. No, it's gotta be one sentence, two sentences. You get, in my opinion, one non-comma punctuation, period. That's right. The other thing is that people will ask a question that even if it's a real question, it's only relevant to them. Like, hey, do you want to work with me on a thing? Hey, can you give me advice about this thing that is only relevant to me? No, the question you should ask has to be something that the whole audience or a good portion of the audience might potentially care about. It also shouldn't be a question that's been asked 100 times at the same person. Be like, ho author person who has written so many books and done lectures and panels at so many conventions. Where do you get your inspiration? I got my inspiration from laughing at asses like you sitting your ass down with your super ass questions. That's where I get it from. Sit your ass down. Next. Now, we don't need to talk more about that because you're gonna run a panel or a lecture or a workshop and people are gonna be trying to ask you questions. So again, don't. But if you must, don't open it up to the audience for questions with more than 10 minutes to go. That's right. Because that means that you didn't have enough in your lecture. A real panel especially. One of the biggest, we talked about lectures this whole time. If you're running a real panel where there's a bunch of people sitting ready to discuss the topic and you go to the audience for questions early all those crappy questions are gonna be what drives your panel. You're giving the reins of your panel to these guys out there. Another thing, do not let anyone ask a question before question asking time. You're sitting there at a panel especially at a nerdy convention, right? Of any kind. There's always gonna be a more than one person in that audience who's raising their hand. Or maybe they won't even be raising their hand. They'll just shout something out. Like, you're wrong. Or yeah, there was, there was a third Gundam in the blah, blah, blah, right? Pretend they do not exist. Do not acknowledge their existence. Just keep going. Don't even look at them. Don't say anything in response to them, right? Don't try to fight with them or anything. Pretend they do not exist and most of them will get a clue. Now, some of them won't. We were at Megfest not that long ago and this guy just sat in the back and he raised his hand like this and he just sat there like, and every now and then he switched hands. He did the like prop the hand up because he's getting tired. I even, at one point a guy said, can I ask a question? And I said, no. And then I just kept going. That guy in the back didn't even flinch. Yeah, the other guy got the guy who I said no to got the idea, right? And I, you know, shouldn't have even said no, but I did because I knew I could do it right. And he's like, no, keep going. No stopping. If you must do this, there's a very simple set of rules you can follow to minimize the damage done by questions. Other than minimizing the amount of time you take questions. Number one, have a goon. Have someone who isn't you with a wireless microphone. If you can pull that off, who goes around gathering questions from the audience. Right. Do not let the people in the audience touch the question asking microphone. For example, if I, if I'm the guy in the audience and I'm going to let Scott ask a question. First, while someone else's question is being dealt with, I go to him like, hey, so what do you want to ask? Like tell me now. I want to ask about underwear. That's not even relevant. You can't ask that. Sorry. You know, you, you have a pre-screener. So you're cutting out the really stupid, or maybe, maybe this is a panel on Chubra. All right, cool. So give me a second. You're next. And then, you know, the, the presenters finished. And I'm like, all right, we have a question here from Scott in the audience. What underwear do you think would be best for me to wear? Even though that was only relevant to me, it's a bad question. But it might have been funny. It's okay. Now the reason you don't let them hold the microphone is that once they've got it, they've got the scepter of power. Now they're sticking to start a big conversation. They're taking over the panel. They're bringing it back to them all about them. You don't want that. It's all about you. You're on stage. Literally don't let them touch it in any capacity. That's right. Now maybe you can have it on a stand and they walk up to it, but they cannot be allowed to touch it. And even then you need someone there who's ready to shoot people away when they're done. So as soon as, look at the, well, you're not at PAX, but the way the PAX Q and A works is they have people walk up and they say their bit and they kind of interact. And as soon as their time is done and enforcer kind of moves them along. And if the enforcer standing next to the microphone making sure- And if they don't move along, that microphone goes dark. That's right. And they move to the other microphone until they sort it out. Even better, what you can do, right, is maybe you have a technologically advanced situation. You can get people to submit their questions digitally and then bring up like the submissions and then read them yourself, right. You can have people tell their questions to the person, your goon. And then the person never even talks into the microphone. The goon asked the question for the person. That was the next technique I was gonna bring up. You go up and you say, hey, what's your question? Like you feel them out? And this might sound rude. You've got to make a determination as to whether or not they were an awkward fanboy or not. You have to suss them out, your goon, and say, all right, this guy I'm gonna let talk because he's probably gonna be okay. Or I cannot let this guy talk. It'll cause a problem. Get him to tell you the question and then you do something like, Scott here has a question. He wants to know what underwear he should wear. Yeah. See how I've cut the fanboy out of the loop. The thing is, don't worry about, say, misrepresenting their question. All right, turn it into the best question you can turn it into or your goon has to turn it into the best question you can turn it into. Everyone else is happy because they've been spared five minutes of agony. That's right. Let's see, are there any other things you can do to improve the Q and A? I feel like I'm missing something important. Q and A is mostly impossible to improve. The best you can do is mitigate harm. Now, the best way to do Q and A is to not actually take questions from the audience but to have your goon or your moderator present to you a series of questions as though it were the Q and A. Panels are where this is best suited. Don't go up to the audience. Have a moderator who already has a list of questions who's going to ask your group of panelists. Like, so how do you feel about Bleach and the second season where they did blah, blah, blah? Also, do not be afraid, right? Some people, they try to answer a lot of questions because they feel bad. All those people wanted to ask questions we didn't get to all of them, especially if it's a famous person, right? No, spend as much time and drag any question out as long as you can, right? Just answer the hell out of it. Keep going that way, less questions. Yup, now, if you don't wanna make the other person feel bad but you wanna get out of questions, especially oftentimes you don't understand their question because it's poorly phrased and maybe they're quiet and you can't really get them to speak up, then what you can do is have a store of anecdotes ready to go and just grasp like grim death onto the first even remotely relevant anecdote to what you think their question might have been and tell that to kill the rest of the time and then end the panel. That's right. So that's pretty much it. We're gonna let this wrap up. You can get back to the rest of your packs. Anime Boston. Anime Boston, because we are still at packs, but- Oh my, look at the time. Do not look at your phone during the middle of the panel. That's a very bad idea. Yup, but we will be here in person, actually in person, not a video tomorrow for both motivational anime, which is shows like Initial D and Fighting Spirit that really pump you up and really make you wanna do stuff that maybe you shouldn't be doing. You definitely will not do. And diamonds in the rough. Anime, you'd never think to watch. Then maybe isn't the best anime, but it is way better than you expect than you probably should watch it. Never judge a book by its cover. I think the best example before we wrap this up, Madoka Magica, who here's seen it? Woo! Woo! See all the people who didn't see it? They probably think it's just a girly show, Joe Magical Girl Show. Or they know never even heard of it. Yeah, but anyway, that's it. Thank you to whoever presented this for us, wherever you are. I don't know. Thank you to anyone who's crazy enough to sit here and watch a video. That guy's still here. What up? That guy. That guy. Hey, that guy's waiting for the next panel. Yeah, I know. Cause the next panel is on the philosophy of bleach. Oh. We out. This has been Geek Nights with Rim and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Kat Lee for Web Design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion news, and more. Remember, Geek Nights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.