A Few More Dungeons & Dragons Presentation Thoughts (and a link to the presentation itself)

Now that my D&D presentation is behind me (huzzah!), I wanted to take a bit of time to look back at the process and detail a few things I would have done differently. The idea behind the presentation was pretty straightforward: I wanted to film the whole thing ahead of time, and then give the audience a series of choices about which way the presentation would go.

For a while, I thought I was going to have to do some sort of fancy editing to enable those choices, but I discovered YouTube has the ability to link to other YouTube videos at the end of each video you upload, so making those choices possible would be as simple as just mapping out how the videos could play out, and then being sure I linked everything the right way.

I learned a few things as I went:

  • To have those “links to other videos” at the end of a YouTube video, the video has to be at least 25 seconds long. There were a few snippet sequences I filmed that were much shorter than that, so I had to end up adding in some empty space at the end of those videos so there was enough time for the menu to pop up.
  • Actually, I had to individually edit each video to add blank space at the end, since the choice menu shows up over whatever is at the end of that video.
  • I used Quicktime to record myself at my laptop. I would then trim the beginning and ending portion of that recording from within Quicktime. I used iMovie to add in the space at the end of each video so I could have the choice menu pop up.
  • Somehow I had thought YouTube only let you have two linked videos at the end of its clips, but after I was into the innards of the interface, I saw you could have up to four links. I would have likely designed my presentation differently had I known about the extra capacity.
  • There were some sections where I wanted to splice YouTube clips into my presentation. I used MacX YouTube Downloader to get this done. It was super easy to do, and made for a seamless presentation.
  • I was impressed how far iMovie has come. Switching between audio tracks and video tracks is a simple process. So much better and more intuitive than it used to be.
  • Having a definite outline of what was going to happen when, and how everything would link together, was key. In the end, I uploaded the videos in reverse order, with the ones that happened at the end of the presentation being uploaded first. This way, I could link the videos that came before them properly once they were uploaded as well. (If that makes sense.)
  • It doesn’t take too much to give the perception of choice without actually having to film 1,000 different variations. For this, I filmed the lecture itself in several chunks. The choices then led to alternate takes that then funneled back to the core presentation each time. That said, if I were to really go all out on this, that could be done with more editing of the videos. It wouldn’t be hard, I don’t think. It would just involve more scripting, more recording, and a better decision tree map.
  • It would be fun to film an actual story this way, though I don’t know that I’ll ever justify the time it would take to do it . . .

With all that out of the way, I realize I linked the video of the presentation on Facebook, but I didn’t do it here. So if you’d like to see a 40 minute discussion about D&D and its impact on our society, check it out:

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