Imitate Mr. Presley for better presentations.
Well…not quite…but I got your attention didn’t I?
Hopefully you’re not quite as cold-bloodedly evil as Monty Burns from the Simpsons cartoon; but his characteristic stance does include an interesting feature that you can definitely use to your advantage when you are making video presentations. Let me explain.
The Importance Of “Friends”
When you are in front of a video camera on your own, you don’t have many friends.
The camera can be seen as a friend and that’s great if it helps you to talk to it in a relaxed and natural way; your only other friends are your stance, your breath and your voice.
Any actor will tell you the importance of these three things in creating a good screen presence. Like an actor you are in front of the lens and trying to play your “part”.
In most marketing videos your “part” is to come across to the audience as confident, assured, authoritative and as natural as possible.
Body Language And Hand Movements
Confidence is portrayed in many ways. Think about your body language.
You see, every body movement is amplified on camera; you may even discover a twitch that you didn’t even know about when you see yourself on video!
While I’m not suggesting that you adopt the stooped and creepy stance of Mr. Burns, you may want to emulate what he does with his hands.
Your hands are a very important component of your stance as they are dexterous and want to move around, fidget and touch things, by their very nature; knowing what to do with them is a constant challenge for presenters, especially when you have adopted an open stance in front of the camera to convey authority, stability and composure.
Keeping the fingertips of each hand joined like Mr. Burns has its advantages. Hopefully you have more than three lizard-like fingers on each hand, but this hand position is a “power position” and helps to present you as a confident figure in control. That’s why I use it in my Melbourne SEO videos.
It’s a very subtle thing that you may not even notice when it’s done correctly, but you will certainly notice when hands are waving around or fidgeting on-screen; it looks unprofessional and doesn’t convey any sense of composure.
So the Mr. Burns stance may work well as a way to steady your hands and stop them moving around when you present your videos. If you try to adopt a straight and neutral posture with hands in this position it should help your all-important confidence, when recording your videos.
There is much more to delivery techniques for video presentations than just your stance and hand positions, but paying attention to the details like this will make all the difference to the professionalism of your videos. Find plenty more tips like this in the Lights, Camera, Profits! workshop by clicking here.