Deciding the BIG picture

By taking all of the skills you learned so far and combining them with a great way of delivering your Prezi, you're bound to be viewed as a Prezi master by colleagues and bosses alike.

The BIG picture technique is a way of presenting your information to an audience so that they can understand how different elements link together. It enables you to structure your message in a way that will be more memorable to your audience, giving your business Prezi a much higher impact than the traditional presentation tools.

The science behind it

The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called neurons, these neurons have tiny branch-like structures that reach out and connect with other neurons. Each place where a neuron connects with another neuron is called a synapse or synaptic connection. The pattern and ways our neurons connect to each other form our neural network. These networks form our ideas, thoughts, and memories.

Think of these neural networks in the same way as the mind maps we looked at earlier. Our brains take in thousands of tiny stimuli every second. In a presentation, the stimuli would normally be images, words, and sounds from the presenter and the group we might be sitting with. Our brains take everything in and connect the dots with neural networks between each piece of stimuli. Where a connection is made, an idea is formed.

In the traditional slide-by-slide approach to presenting, it is more difficult for the brain to make connections. This is generally a downside to the way presentations are put together, that is, it's hard to connect a concept on slide 2 to something on slide 50 an hour later.

As Prezi gives us such freedom to move around the canvas and zoom in and out of different elements, it's very easy for us to present in a way that aids the brain in creating neural networks. This, in turn, leads to our Prezi's messages being remembered for longer and in more detail than by using slides.

Neural networks in action

In order to explain how Prezi can help build neural networks, what better tool to use than Prezi itself? If you have an Internet connection while you're reading this, you can go to http://prezi.com/vuf5fbirwjke/big-picture-thinking/ and refer to a Prezi explaining this concept. If you don't have an Internet connection, refer to the screenshots we added of the same Prezi.

If you follow the steps explained here when constructing your Prezi, you are bound to deliver a much more powerful message:

1. Show your audience the first piece of information.
   
2. Move to the next piece of information; don't rush things.
   
3. Move along again until you've covered all the key elements.
   
4. Zoom out to show all of the key elements and their relationships in one view.
   
5. You can zoom out again to display even more relationships between the information.
   
6. Your audience will remember the relationships and understand the BIG picture.
   

Tip

You can create a copy of the preceding Prezi online at http://prezi.com/vuf5fbirwjke/big-picture-thinking/ to store it in your own Prezi account.

This Prezi explains how to help create the neural networks discussed using the BIG picture technique itself.

You can see how at the start we are already zoomed in to one neuron of the brain, and then we slowly move outwards. The previous two images clearly show the connections between everything that we previously saw in the Prezi.

In the final frame of the Prezi, we zoomed out completely to see an image of the brain. This is the BIG picture view for this particular Prezi, as it clearly demonstrates that everything we've been seeing happens inside the human brain.

Note

If you can deliver every message in your presentation in this way, then you will truly be a Prezi master.

How to find your BIG picture

If done correctly, you should start to see your BIG picture form in the planning stage of your Prezi (step 1 – Planning your Prezi). By using the Mind Mapping techniques explained earlier, you will start to see connections between the different elements of your Prezi. At this stage, you should ask yourself the question "What single image could sum up the links between everything?"

It might be difficult to find the right image, and in some cases, it might need a combination of images together. However, the key messages along the way should all be delivered inside of the BIG picture.

Tip

The BIG picture in reverse

You can also try using the BIG picture technique in reverse order. Show the BIG picture at the very start of your Prezi, then zoom in to the details and explain the relationships.

To help you practice finding images that sum up a series of different elements and link them together, have a go at completing the following table. Hopefully, you'll start to get much better at this with time—if you master the three Prezi design steps, of course!

				What image would you use to connect everything?
Book	Cream	Glasses	Towel
Mushrooms	Dough	Tomatoes	Cheese
Revenue	Client base	Contract	Projects
Employees	Salaries	Sick Leave	Grievances
Club	Tee	Ball	Sand