TED Talk Reflection

Here’s the recording of my TED Talk. The audio’s a little bit laggy and the black screen runs a little long at the end, but I couldn’t be bothered to edit that after the utter garbage that is Windows Movie Maker shut down on me for the fifteenth time. (I’m not even exaggerating; it stopped responding at least ten times while I was doing this. Talk about saying nothing but the f-bomb for several minutes straight.)

On the whole, I’m pretty happy with my performance. I think I sounded natural, my eye contact and volume were decent, and I said almost everything I meant to say. On the negative side, I didn’t really know what to do with myself while the audio clip was playing, which is a problem I’d anticipated and thought about beforehand. All I could think of in the end was to watch the screen, hopefully not too awkwardly. I also had a few short brain farts (“Um…”) but I think I passed those as dramatic pauses well enough. In my feedback for the civic life speech, I was told that my sentences kind of tail off at the ends, and I definitely see what you guys mean now. I’ll have to work on that. I’ll also have to work on staying in the box, since I’m halfway off-screen for the first few minutes. Oops.

The TED talks I saw as an audience member were pretty good on the whole too. We got some really different ones (Jake’s was very funny and out there, and Talia’s was so compelling because it was a personal story), and even those that were more conventional had some laugh lines and/or gags thrown in, which I think worked great. There were also some really fascinating topics presented; I especially liked Angela’s (Vocaloid is great). Good job, guys! 🙂