@StaffordMasie (delivering a tech talk at the @InoVatioDistrib conference), originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

Stafford Masie used to be the head dude at Google South Africa. (Yeah… you can google him.) He talked to Inovatio‘s channel partners about the direction technology is taking us in the near future.

The key takeout from his talk is this…

Businesses HAVE TO have agility.

One of his key hints about business success is that we need to embrace video. In a big way.

This pic was made live, on the spur of the moment, on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc, running Autodesk SketchBookPro 2011.

Boxing Clever — a WinWin Group conference for Unilever, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

Thanks to the genius of David and Steve at the WinWin Group, Unilever had what must rank as one of the most exciting and DIFFERENT conferences ever!

My role on the production was to provide visual facilitation for Gary McGaghey.

This pic was taken by one of the crew members. He was stationed up near the ceiling to capture video and stills of the event.

What you’re seeing is roughly half of the room. The entire space is a massive square, just on 22 x 22 x 22 x 22 metres. It’s about 2.5 to 3 stories tall. The screens are all joined, with uninterrupted pictures on all four surfaces. It’s built from scratch in one of the Durban International Conference Centre spaces.

Dean Foure of Integrity, the company that provides the projection system, tells me that it took the rigging crew almost four full days AND nights to get the structure set up. And it’s HUNDREDS of tons of wood and scaffolding.

Dean says it takes almost twelve hours to get all eight projectors EXACTLY balanced, colour-matched, aligned. And those eight projectors cost R10 million. (Each one is about the size of half a Fiat Uno.)

I’ve worked on big screens before. But never anything on this scale. And, as it happens, this is the first time anything this big has ever been seen in South Africa.

Gary’s talk had a boxing theme. So that’s me in the foreground in boxing garb. And all of my pictures were boxing-related.

I pre-drew almost everything, with two layers… a before layer, and a final-state layer. I then used my eraser tool to ‘live-erase’ the before layer stuff out of the way to reveal what lies beneath.

At the same time, I was moving the canvas into a new position every few seconds to stay in sync with Gary’s talk.

Audience loved it. Client loved it. WinWin loved it. I loved it. That’s a lot of love.

Many people ask me whether or not visual facilitation is distracting to delegates.

The short answer is a loud and emphatic, ‘NO!!!’

The long answer is probably best addressed by Tom Wujec from Autodesk, delivering a TEDTalk in February 2009:

In a nutshell, he shows us how information entering the eye is processed ACTIVELY by the Primary Visual Cortex. This first port of call for light tells the brain simple things about geometry. But it ALSO coordinates information with around 30 or so OTHER parts of the brain, leading to ‘Aha!’ moments in lacing information together.

One of these other parts is the VENTRAL STREAM. This detects WHAT something is.

A second communication flow lands up in the DORSAL STREAM. This locates something in physical space. WHERE something is.

A third activation takes place in the LIMBIC SYSTEM. This is an ancient part of our brains, and it handles emotion, feeling.

Any visual stimulus activates those three subsystems (along with many others). This activation process is ongoing during a graphic facilitation. It works on three levels…

1. Images clarify.
2. They make the brain interact with concepts.
3. And they augment our memory through visual persistance.

A big THANK YOU to @JeanneDP on Twitter for the link to Tom’s video.

Graphic facilitation isn't harmed by a bit of showmanship sometimes. Depending on the needs of the client. The client in this case wanted visual facilitation within a James Bond themed evening. The key is getting a really tight brief from the client. Knowing what kind of illustrations they need. The pictures have to do a lot of work after the event. Which means they have to stand on their own feet.

A friend has been conversing with me in email about the practicalities of graphic facilitation. One of his questions was this: ‘Does the digital aspect enhance the visual facilitator’s creativity?’

I suspect this answer will vary between different practitioners.

I’ll dodge and enhance the question by changing its terms of reference…

Digital Works For Me… AND For My Clients

For me, it would be almost inconceivable working non-digitally. I’ve done it. And the results were good. But my experience of the process was not so good.

Painting my illustrations digitally makes it possible for me to do a significant amount of pre-production. I can set up different backgrounds for different parts of the talk. I can create icons that can become part of my visual vocabulary, which I can insert at will. This means that the client gets much more value out of me than if I were working in an analogue medium.

While doing graphic facilitation on my tablet pc, I feel no pressure about mistakes. I can erase or undo at will. And this adds an element of suspense and even humour for people watching the stuff I’m painting. If I work on paper, I’m pretty much committed to whatever errors I make. Which puts pressure on things.

On a personal level, my creativity is certainly enhanced by the colours and tools available to me. I’d be hesitant to work with messy magic markers and smeary paper.

The Goal of a Graphic Facilitation: Making the Content Memorable for Onlookers

However, I need to question the value of ‘creativity’ in visual facilitation. The objective of a good visual facilitation is to provide each delegate with a memorable visual interpretation of a session.

Is there a link between ‘memorable’ and ‘creative’? Probably. But not *necessarily*. My mission is not to be creative in the room. It’s to make the material vivid and memorable.

I’ve worked with a speaker who has been humiliated by an overly creative visual facilitator. The artist was intent on making funny pictures rather than enhancing the content of the talk.

The speaker told me that while he was making points that usually brought solemn reflection and tears, this particular audience was roaring with inappropriate laughter. Laughter at the expense of the speaker, cos the ‘artist’ was turning everything into gags.

A visual facilitator is not the star of the show. The material delivered by the speaker is the star.

Deliver the Material (But Avoid Stick Figures)

I focus on the delivery and enhancement of the material, not on the creativity.

I’ve done some ‘uncreative’ yet memorable visual facilitations that clients and delegates have loved. If the material is the hero, people love the pics. At the same time, they’re not hiring me to draw stick figures.

A good digital visual facilitation session requires more than just a tablet pc. This is my toolkit 'checklist' to make sure I have everything with me in my kitbag.

A friend of mine recently asked me whether a tablet pc enhances the visual facilitation/graphic facilitation experience for delegates. There are two ways of doing visual facilitation… digitally (on a tablet pc, or using a Wacom tablet), or analog (using paper and pen).

I work almost exclusively on my tablet pc, and I have many reasons for doing so.

These are some of the factors I’ve found that make the digital experience better for the delegates and for my clients…

1. It’s projected big. As big as the speaker’s PowerPoint. Which means that the visual facilitation is hierarchically equivalent to the PowerPoint.

2. It’s interactive. The speaker is able to address the visual facilitator live, and ask for things. This keeps the room very much alive.

3. It’s exciting for delegates to see a work-in-progress unfolding before their eyes. It literally keeps people awake and on the edge of their seats.

4. Seeing it unfold live during the talk creates multiple and ongoing *productive* cognitive dissonance. Delegates brains are *always* engaged, wondering ‘what’s next?’, ‘how does this picture resolve?’, ‘does the visual facilitator’s interpretation of this point match my own?’

5. The live unfolding of the pictures makes the take-home digital painting deeply meaningful, and already-familiar. A ‘traditional’ visual facilitator working on paper at the back of the room will photograph or scan the pic. And send that to the client. When delegates finally see those images, the topic is long-cold. And the images are new to them. They have no cognitive investment in the images. With the live version, delegates are *part of* those pictures. They *participated* in the generation of the pics. So they recognise them.

6. There are multiple NLP-anchor-points in a live visual facilitation. Because of the ongoing cognitive dissonance, delegates also experience ‘aha!’ moments, which ‘attach’ to parts of the painting and associate with the points being made. The points become meaningful to the delegate.

7. The digital experience is also very colourful. This is in contrast to the paper-based visual facilitator’s limited palette. Also, the digital illustration style can be varied tremendously due to the range of digital tools available to the visual facilitator.

8. The digital visual facilitator is able to zoom in and out of his or her picture, helping delegates to focus on specific points. And the digital canvas size can be varied. Also, things can be moved, erased, emphasised.

Doodle Using ‘SketchBook Mobile Express’ For Android, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

I’ve been yearning for a decent drawing app for my Android phone (I have an HTC DESIRE). MAGIC DOODLE was the closest I was able to get to actually USING the phone for drawing. But it had too many drawbacks for it to become anything more than a curiosity.

Now, AutoDesk has risen to the challenge by releasing SketchBook Mobile Express for Android. The app has been around for ages on the iPhone and iPad.

My verdict? It’s absolutely brilliant! Totally intuitive way of choosing tools, colours, resizing brushes, working with layers. Potent user interface.

Limitations? It’s the free version of a much more potent app. So it seems you can only work with a total of three active layers, you can’t save a work-in-progress, you can only export PNG versions of your image, your canvas size is limited, and you have a limited number of tools.

Biggest limitation? Being a South African citizen means I’m persona non-grata in the world of Google Apps Store. We’re STILL not allowed to buy anything. So the paid-version remains out of reach. Come on, Google! Wake up! The world is not limited to America!

Jennifer Mosaic — Made Using Free Foto-Mosaik-Edda, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

Pretty damn impressive free software! Makes a database of all the pictures you want to include in your mosaics. Then assembles them to create a picture out of your source pic. Fricking amazing. http://www.sixdots.de/mosaik/en/.

101 Uses For Your Vuvuzela — Mel Gibson, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

David Germond of The Win Win Group emailed me a challenge… To come up with alternative uses for your vuvuzela now that the World Cup is over.

His email was simple. It said: ‘This is what Zapiro did…‘

So here’s my stab at it.

I took a good hour to do a Google search for a suitable Mel Gibson picture. I was hunting for one where he spews vitriol, something to match the sound of his voice on the leaked recordings of his verbal abuse of his wife.

It seems his public relations handlers are on full red alert doing urgent fire-fighting. There are only a very few unsavoury pics of the man. And those are tame.

Anyway. I found this one. It suits my purpose. It’s from ContactMusic.

I originally intended making a caricature of him. But when I was dummying up the composition, I liked the juxtaposition of the photo with the drawing. So that’s what I stuck with.

This picture was made entirely in ArtRage 3 (with the exception of the photo of Mel Gibson, which is used without permission). No vuvuzelas were abused in the making of this muzzle. Mind the drool.

By the way, you have 13 days left to take advantage of my half-price offer. Book and pay for my services as a visual facilitator before Friday 30 July, and you get me for a massive 50% saving. Email Jennifer for details: bookings@royblumenthal.com

Blumenthal’s ‘Back From Berlin Bash’ — Visual Facilitation at half-price for two weeks, originally uploaded by royblumenthal.

Just returned from Berlin. A top multinational pharmaceutical company made use of my services as a visual facilitator.

To give YOU the chance to experience what Europe’s corporate top brass experienced, I’m BASHING my prices for just two weeks.

If you book and pay for a visual facilitation session with me in the next two weeks, you’ll get me FOR HALF PRICE.

We’re accepting bookings at half price until Friday 30 July. This offer is valid for events up to 31 December 2010. All you have to do is book and pay before 30 July, and you get a MASSIVE DISCOUNT. HALF OFF!

So while I’m cooling off from the 40 degree temperatures of Berlin, you can heat up your boardroom by having me make live pictures of your event.

UPDATE: Thanks to Nelson Mandela Day on 18 July, I’ve added a bonus to this promotion… Take advantage of my special, and I’ll throw in a FREE half-day visual facilitation for a Gauteng-based NGO of your choice. You get to give back. I get to give back. The NGO gets to experience visual facilitation. It’s a win-win-win! So what are you waiting for? BOOK ME TODAY!

Book me NOW by emailing Jennifer on bookings@royblumenthal.com. Act now. The half-price window closes on Friday 30 July.

This picture was created live during a ‘best practice sharing’ convention held in Berlin.

John vd Ruit, world best-selling author of the hit series of SPUD novels, popped his voice into my cellphone a while back. I made this video out of it.

I drew three ink-on-paper sketches of John in my Moleskine. I scanned them, then tidied them up and coloured them in Photoshop CS3. I hauled them into CrazyTalk 6 and animated the pics.

Finally, I composited everything together in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.

All audio editing was done in Audacity.

The music is a Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ licensed track I found on Jamendo. It’s called ColdRain by Silent Assassin.

This video is released under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution, Share-Alike’ license. Which means you can remix it, and do whatever you like with it. As long as you credit me as the originator, and that you release it under a similar license.