Developing Different Contrasts
Lesson 10 from: FAST CLASS: Heroic Public SpeakingMichael Port, Amy Port
Developing Different Contrasts
Lesson 10 from: FAST CLASS: Heroic Public SpeakingMichael Port, Amy Port
Lessons
Steal the Show
04:52 2The Principles of Performance
14:08 3Communicating Without Words
04:16 4Find Your Voice: Breathing
26:37 5Find Your Voice: Build your Voice
04:52 6Working On Your Speech
10:52 7Finding Your Big Idea!
13:56 8Sorting Your Big Idea
04:32Lesson Info
Developing Different Contrasts
Hey, so welcome back! So, we are talking about contrast in this particular segment and as we like to say, contrast is king. You know, whether you are presenting for 15 minutes or an hour or you are presenting for two days, what keeps our audience engaged with us? One of the things that keeps our audience engaged with us is providing a lot of contrast. So, one way to do that. Uhh Well, there's three main ways to do that. You can create contrast in the structure of your speech. You can create contrast in the delivery, how you deliver and also emotional contrast. That's the third of the three ways. And what we're going to do in this last segment is go through and talk about various ways that you can bring in that contrast. And we're going to look specifically at some clips from Michael's One man show, the keynote, the think Big Revolution, so that you can see how he puts that into practice Now, always, as always, you will put it into practice differently. And that's the beauty of it being...
an art form, you will put it into practice in different ways. But like everything else that we've been bringing to you, the frameworks, the big idea, the big promise, you get to make it your own and it's important that you do. So we're gonna start with structural contrast. Now very often when you're giving a speech, you are not the only person speaking, there will be people who speak before you are people who speak after you. You can create contrast right then and there if you're there and aware of who's performing before you, then it's beautiful to come in with a very different energy than you may have been preceded by but within within your own content. So, one way to create some uh contrast within your structure is to tell stories and then give content or curriculum and then use a story. It will all tie into your through line as we talked about earlier, but we listen differently to stories than we do to structured, modular sequential any of that kind of content. Uh and it will bring out you'll see different qualities in you when we talk about the different roles that you play, you may find that when you're talking about content that you'll be going through, here is this module and here is this module. But when you tell a story still authentically you and without the storyteller voice, you, it will bring out a different uh physicality in you. Maybe a different use of your voice, but even just the structure in and of itself between content and story catches people's ears. Another way to bring in variation within the structure is to mess with the timeline. So if let's say I'm telling a story about a so I was once engaged, that wedding never happened, I was actually engaged another time and that one did. But if I'm telling the story of it, I can go to the beginning of the story. I was once engaged to the end of the story, that wedding never happened and I could then go back. You can know the end of a story and then proceed to have the whole story happen sequentially from there. You can mess with the timeline. So the next major category is delivery contrast and this is the place that that for me anyway, feels really, really juicy because you can have a you can have delivery contrast in, let's say, the video and the talking. Uh, Michael has also used with great success auditory using sound, whether it's music or other things, which will show you in a minute, which in the video. So, so delivery contrast is could be, it's the thing that I you look at first, uh of course, as we said, you look at um um content contrast as you're producing it, as you're creating it. But in rehearsals where you're looking for delivery contrast, you're looking at how many different ways can I deliver this material? So that there is lots of contrast. Okay, I'm gonna show a video now, I'm going to tell them a story sitting on the edge of the stage, but now I'm gonna teach them a number of things, but I'm going to get up on the table and do it from up there. Then now I'm going to have each one of them say something, I'm going to go into the audience, and I'm gonna go back up on stage. Now, I'm gonna lie down, you see now I'm going to move very quickly. So these are all different ways of delivering, but there's lots of contrast and you build it into a presentation, you design it, you rehearse it, but when you've been doing this for a long time, you start to feel it, try to find opportunities for it in a moment. But of course, the things that need to be built into it are things like videos or doing those kind of interactive exercises, because you have to know exactly how all of that's going to go. If you need to stand on the table, you make sure that it's a table that will support you. If you're gonna go into the audience, need to make sure that you can get back on stage, because if you jump off a stage that is really, really big, you might have to run all the way around back through the door to get there may not actually be steps going down. That does happen, you gotta go backstage and around, otherwise you find yourself stuck down there. So these are things that you need to take into account before you do that. So those are the big things that you would find in rehearsal, but even smaller things like where are the moments that you really use your voice? And then you go in for one specific little point. That's a delivery contrast. That's a delivery content because it sounds different here at different. There's a there's a there's there's the physical contrast, there's the movement, lots of movement and then still this, we'll show you a video to represent that also. And then just to put the term out there blocking it's a term you should all be familiar with. It's a theater term and what it simply means is the staging. So to give you a little bit of structure here, we call this, I'm out of my light up stage and we call this downstage. And that simply has to do with the fact that in the olden days the stage was actually what they call raked. It was on a slant, It wasn't flat like this. Every stage was on a, on a rake so that you could be seen rather than the audience being on a rake, which is how it is normally write. It was flat audience with a raked stage, which is very interesting for ankles as a performer, especially in high heels. But so we had upstage and downstage and then we have stage left, which is the performers. Left stage right? Is the performers right? I'll give you an example, um, sit down for one second. Give you an example when I do book yourself solid. I put the foundation over here. There are four building blocks. One is here, ones over here, ones over here, and the ones over here. Okay, so there's four. And then I put the second module over here, I put the third module over here and I put the fourth module over there. Now, if I have a stage like this, I have to make some adjustments because I'm not gonna be able to put The whole thing all building blocks from stage left to stage right? And this is house, right? And house left. From your perspective, that's right, and that's left. But from our perspective, that's left and that's right. So I'll need to change it up, I need to adjust it and I need to make sure before I come in here that the lights are set so that I can use the whole stage in a way that I want. So now I'm creating all this contrast just through the blocking where I anchor different ideas and then there's emotional contrast. Yes, emotional contrast, of course, is so important. Funny light to very serious and intense, maybe something that's sad and really quite touching to something that is quite shocking and confronting. So we're trying to find as much of that as possible. The greatest movies that you've watched, The greatest plays that you've seen, The greatest concerts that you've heard have the most emotional contrast because they take you on this ride. It's a roller coaster ride. One minute you're laughing and all of a sudden you find yourself crying. Your laughter turned into tears, or your tears turned into laughter. That's an extraordinary moment to create. So that's what we're going for. So when were conceiving of our material, we're trying to organize it so that it has emotional contrast. So you see how the emotional contrast, of course, is influenced by the content contrast, Right. The information contrast, because if the if the information that you're imparting doesn't have emotional contrast in it, it's very hard to produce emotional contrast.
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