How a screenwriting technique can level up your presentation skills

Watch carefully almost any movie today and you will notice that the sound of the next scene sometimes starts before you see the picture. Often this overlap is a sound effect — maybe you hear the sound of a noisy street before you cut from a quiet interior to a busy street scene. Other times you will hear a fragment of dialog from the next scene just before the image appears. At the very beginning of The Hunger Games (2012), for example, we hear the voice of Wes Bentley’s character, Head Gamemaker Seneca Crane, while the screen is still black, before we see that he is being interviewed.

This effect is called a “pre lap” and it was originally a technique used by editors to make stronger transitions that bind scenes together more tightly, pulling the audience along with the story. More recently it has also been repurposed by screen writers, who will sometimes write a dialog pre lap into their original script to emphasize a point, or sometimes to make a transition funnier.

You can also borrow this pre lap technique to make the visual transitions in your presentations more impactful. Over the years I have spent many rehearsal hours, clicker in hand, trying to work out the optimal moment to click. My conclusion is that a well-timed pre-lap effect is often the most effective way to do this.

Traditionally, presenters click to change a slide, then start to tell the story that accompanies the new visual. The problem with this method is that the instant you change a slide, people are momentarily distracted as they take in the new image, so they miss a critical part of your story. It also gives the impression that the presenter is simply following the slides, which weakens the impact of the presentation, making the message less convincing and the speaker less “charismatic”.

What works much better is to treat the slide transition like a cut between scenes, and to pre lap your comment. This means that you start to talk about the story behind the next image, and then click after a few seconds. At that point the audience is already following you, so they are not distracted. And the delayed transition is somehow more satisfying, just like a well-timed pre lap in a movie.

To use this technique you you need to know your story so that you can talk confidently without the support of the visual. And, of course, to use this effect you always need to know which visual is coming next. You should really know that anyway, because one of the surest ways to make a lame presentation is to click for the next slide and then simply talk about that. A presentation that is story driven is always more compelling than one that is slide driven.

Knowing which comes next in your presentation is not difficult if you focus on essential visuals, structure your presentation so that there is a logic in the transitions, and practice the changes. I always download a copy of the next presentation to my phone and when I have a spare minute I swipe through the slides, making sure that I know what comes next after each one.

Using the pre-lap technique you can level up your presentation skills, leveraging the knowledge built up by the screen writing community and field-tested in movies and TV shows. Learning from these master storytellers is both an effective and fun way to become an inspiring speaker.

Leactures, Workshops & Coaching

Pre lap transitions are just one of the many ways that presenters can learn from screenwriters to make their presentations more impactful, more memorable and more effective. If you would like to learn more of these techniques ask me about the lecture/workshop Borrow Screenwriter Techiques to Make Presentations Compelling. You can also master the same skills through a package of individual coaching sessions, either in-person in Stockholm or virtually from anywhere. Contact me through speaker@andrewhennigan.com