By popular demand, we’ve added another date to our 2Day VisualStory lineup! If you missed out on getting a seat at the April or July sessions, join us on June 27 & 28.

Register here:
https://www.duarteshop.com/2dvisualstory-jun-27-2012.html 

2Day VisualStory™ Event Details

When you combine the persuasive power of the spoken word with memorable visuals, your ideas become unstoppable. In Duarte’s two-day deep dive into VisualStory™, you’ll write your next presentation using the power of story structure, and storyboard slides using effective visual display of information. You’ll walk in with an idea and leave with that idea developing into a persuasive visual story.

Who should attend:
Anyone who has critical persuasive communication to deliver and has an influential leadership role. Primarily senior manager level and above who write their own content and use slides to express their insights visually. During the two days, you will begin to write and storyboard your next critical presentation and be transformed as a communicator.

What to bring:
Each participant needs to have a presentation idea s/he wants to write and storyboard. This could be an old one in need of a rewrite, or new presentation. Printouts are ok, as a reference point, but not required.

What not to bring:
A laptop. You won’t need one. We work with pens and sticky notes.

What you’ll learn:
Day 1: Create you content in a story form

• Understand the Business Case for Story
• Understand the Hero’s Journey – and apply it to their audience’s journey
• Develop a Big Idea – and address an audience’s Risk, Resistance and Reward
• Practice rapid brainstorming to generate content
• Create out-of-the-box concepts and perspectives
• Embed contrast to create interest through tension and release
• Construct clear turning points
• Use the Presentation Form™ to analyze their presentation
• Establish audience empathy

Day 2: Visually design you content for effective understanding.

• Build an analog storyboard
• Identify a slide’s signal vs. noise ratio
• Arrange slide elements for audience comprehension
• In teams, turn words into picture and think like a designer
• Think like a designer

Where you go:
Our creative headquarters in Mountain View, California. We offer our 2Day VisualStory workshop once a quarter.

Duarte, Inc.
161 East Evelyn Avenue
Mountain View, CA 94041

Why do this:
Give you the competitive advantage by standing out. Spend 16 hours actually working on your presentation, writing content and visualizing your story. Pick up important story development tools that change the way you communicate. See how content and visual design work together to create a persuasive communication that will compel your audience to action.

My first drawing consisted of two ninjas fighting on top of a dragon in the hills of Miami. Weird, I know, but that’s what I came up with as a kid sketching his wild imagination during class.

Today, I’m still drawing, but taking more of an “adult” approach by applying my love for drawing to creating a variety of storyboards on things like global awareness, reality travel shows, and the next evolution of social networking. Still fun, but nothing compared to drawing ninjas on a dragon.

So when I attended the most recent SketchCrawl with some of my workmates, we each got in touch with that inner child and expressed what we saw through the art of drawing. There wasn’t a script, deadline, or agenda to follow. All we needed was a pen, pencil, or stylus to do one simple thing: DRAW.

SketchCrawl is a drawing “marathon” that celebrates the spirit of creating. The event began in San Francisco, but has since spread globally. The idea is to take your typical PubCrawl, but visually record everything in sight as you move from place to place. In its fourth year, sketching tools have moved beyond pencils and pens to iPads and the variety of sketching/painting apps at their fingertips. Becoming a new type of canvas for digital art, this sophisticated form has become increasingly popular here at the shop.

Anyone and everyone came out for the event–an elderly married couple, a family enjoying a beautiful Saturday morning, and several digital artists from some of the top animation studios. The crawl was definitely more tiring than I imagined, but it was so much fun connecting with people, and sharing artwork with curious folks who just happened to walk by and seeing how others interpret the surroundings.

“I forget sometimes how awesome it is that I live in a city with so much great architecture, parks, and diverse people… We should take advantage and sketch more often!”
– Frances Liddell, Designer

We started the day in North Beach and hopped all the way down to Washington Square Park, sketching what we saw along the way, stopping long enough to appreciate the little things just a tad longer and a bit deeper. Spending time with a communal group of artists, it was inspiring comparing what we love and discussing our thoughts on our illustrations.

People sketched everything from the small café that was under construction, the famous Molinari Delicatessen, to a pizzeria owner throwing dough in the air. It was in capturing these little moments and adding our own personality through our illustrations did I realize the charm of SketchCrawl.

We were documenting life. And through that documentation with others, you feel inspired to do more, provide different takes on our environment, and absorb details through the variety in our sensibilities. Pretty incredible, yet it doesn’t take an event like SketchCrawl to get that feeling.

If that day of drawing taught me anything, it’s that you can pick up any illustrative tool wherever you are at any time. Just take that moment to capture what’s around you and enjoy the creativity that comes from within. Whether you’re a visual storyteller, an engineer, or just a five-year-old drawing ninjas, it’s all about one simple thing… having fun.

Learn to think faster, sell better, and see the invisible by thinking in pictures.

International bestselling author Dan Roam wrote “The Back of the Napkin” to help us all become visual thinkers, and within months his book became an international phenomenon, prompting leaders from Google to the White House to pick up their pens and start drawing their best ideas.

Now Dan has launched The Napkin Academy (www.napkinacademy.com), the world’s first online visual-thinking course. By watching Dan’s short and fun videos, in just 15 minutes a day you can become a master visual thinker — even if you haven’t drawn since kindergarten. So pick up a pen and paper, log on to www.napkinacademy.com, and see how easy it is to think faster and sell better with pictures!

And, as a special launch promotion, if you register using the secret coupon code BLACKPEN, Dan will automatically knock 25% off the already low $39.99 annual registration fee. That gives you a full year of world-class visual thinking training for only $29.99. (But register fast; this coupon will expire April 30, 2012.)

Dan Roam
Author of “Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work” and “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures” Fast Company’s #1 business book and BusinessWeek’s #1 innovation book.

Resonate has made the leap from book to iBook! A significantly enhanced version of the best-selling business book is currently on an iBookshelf near you.

We are proud to say that Resonate is the first interactive business book built using Apple’s iBooks Author, a tool to help publishers create digital books that leverage the iPad’s video, sound, interactive diagrams, and text functionality. If not for the outstanding capabilities of the program (and the iPad!), the Resonate iBook would simply not exist.

The app enabled our designers to create and convey content not possible on the printed page. Resonate’s original print publication contained references to online multimedia content, but it was a separate experience from reading the book. With the iPad’s ability to to support interactive applications and multimedia, the reader is able to transition seamlessly between static and multimedia content.

“Even though Duarte originally packaged Resonate for print, this book was waiting for the interactive opportunity made available in iBooks Author. The iPad technology allows us to produce the book in the visual, cinematic manner I originally envisioned.”
–Nancy Duarte

Among the key concepts in Resonate is the “sparkline,” a representation of the dramatic shape of any persuasive presentation. While this is explained in the print version of Resonate, in the new iPad publication the sparklines come to life through the use of embedded interactive JavaScript applications. These interactive apps intertwine the data in the sparklines with audio recordings of the speeches. The book includes analysis of speeches given by President Ronald Reagan, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Steve Jobs.

The iBook is packed with goodies, but we walk through our favorite features here:

To buy the new iPad edition of Resonate, visit:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/resonate/id517154732?mt=11

I love knowing people that have so much passion, they MAKE their dreams come true. On the heels of Lou’s successful work on whale entanglement with “In the Wake of Giants”, he has started a kickstarter campaign to create the sequel, “Northern Wake”.

You can help by donating, or reposting the link to get the word out!
Here, we even made a tiny URL for you: http://tinyurl.com/7wukqe9

Here’s Lou’s current award-winning short film:

You’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker, what are some of the roadblocks you had to overcome to realize your dream?

Lou: The roadblocks, how do you do a natural history documentary meant to compete with fully crewed, budgeted films? You do it by making it personal, and by bringing every lesson you’ve learned in thirty years to bear on the final piece. It was brutal.

The footage of entangled whales was mostly captured on cameras the Hawaiian Island Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary was using for research. Helmet cams. Nobody bothered to clean the lens of water spots, they weren’t planning to do anything like this before. There were hundreds of hours of un-logged footage of whales that had gotten themselves tangled up in marine debris.

I had to go through several documented rescues, three to four cameras per effort, and find synced stories. Hoping for some semblance of coverage before a battery died or a card filled up and went unchanged. It was part luck, part magic, and then…more luck.

“In The Wake Of Giants” may not have come to fruition and definitely not been award-winning if you hadn’t put your own personal passion into it. What did you learn from this experience?

Lou: Yeah, passion is right. But passion about what? That’s the real question here. If I’d listened to the “whale-huggers” around me, I’d have made a film about whales. Lots of whales, breaching and frolicking and looking all majestic and beautiful. “Charismatic Megafauna” as they’re often categorized. And that’s where passion came in. The film is about people, good people, who sacrifice a lot and risk a lot to survive a quest–to accomplish a mission. It’s a story.

More to the point, it’s a hero’s journey. The week after we premiered, I showed it to you, Nancy. You were writing your book, Resonate, and gave me a copy of “The Writer’s Journey”. I couldn’t believe it, finally someone explained to me what I’d been doing. It’s funny how you can have passion about something you don’t totally get. Then somehow it’s explained to you and you become evangelistic about it. That’s what’s happened with me, these films, and the commitment to story.

There are a LOT of natural history films around that are these meandering, well-scored moving wallpapers. I want a story. That’s what I’ve become most passionate about, and what I’ve learned from doing this.

What kinds of work do you do to “pay the bills” so you can continue to produce short films?

Lou: I’ve done just about every job in production. So I’ll do what it takes these days. I prefer to produce, write and direct and take clients with me into realms they never dreamed possible for their product or service. I’m focusing a LOT on micro-documentaries, targeting three minute story packets for multiple screen sizes. My website, www.blatsnapper.com, has some examples.

There are film-school students who will work for Top Ramen and Cheese Whiz. So I’ve been producing more guerilla styled work but avoiding the day rate. Instead I’ll tell a client they can buy me for a discounted week. If they get tired of my ranting about story, they can tell me to cook them dinner, and I’ll happily do it.

You have a Kickstarter campaign for your new film. What will it be about?

Lou: The next film is the sequel to In The Wake Of Giants. It picks up where the first film left off, to answer the question, “How can we prevent this from happening in the first place?”

It’s through the unlikely collaboration of commercial fishermen, conservationists and scientists. Fisherman are prototyping new methods and working alongside the conservation community. Of course, we will also be shooting new rescue footage as it happens. I expect there might be more activity up there than in past years. As the polar caps recede, new areas for oil exploration are opening up. There will be 33 new exploratory vessels from Shell Oil alone this summer in Alaskan waters. More activity means more likely encounters between marine mammals and humans. This is the summer to be there. I need to raise $42,000 through kickstarter to match the outside grant funding I’m after for a small guerilla budget of $68,000. That’s a drop in the proverbial ocean.

There are two things that make kickstarter.com work for projects. Of course, the first is gaining backers for the project. But, a close second is sheer volume of tweets, retweets, and social networking. Nancy, if your readers could take a minute and repost the link here, I think the next thirty days or so could be a blast!