A film editor once described their job to me like this: we have four hundred hours of footage. The film is ninety minutes. Everything is about what you cut.
I think about that almost every time I open a new presentation brief.
The discipline of filmmaking is not about capturing everything. It's about knowing which moment, of all the available moments, will create the specific feeling the audience needs to feel at this precise point in the story. Everything else — everything that's true, accurate, relevant, interesting — gets cut.
This is not what most people think of when they think about presentation design. They think about arrangement, about visual choice, about which template to use. They don't think about the director's essential question: what must this audience feel, right now, for the story to work?
The filmmaker's vocabulary
Film has developed a precise vocabulary for the manipulation of attention and emotion. Most of it translates directly to presentations.
The establishing shot gives the audience their bearings. In film, it's the wide shot that orients you — city skyline, country road, open office — before the camera closes in on the specific story. In presentations, the establishing shot is the context slide. Not "here's our agenda" but "here's the world this presentation exists in." The situation on the ground. The stakes. The moment. It creates the frame within which everything that follows is understood.
The close-up is the moment of specific detail that makes an abstraction real. A film about a corporate fraud doesn't stay at altitude — it finds the one employee, the one transaction, the one phone call, and slows down for it. The close-up makes the audience feel the scale through the specific. In presentations, the close-up is the case study, the quote from a real customer, the single data point that crystallizes what might otherwise be a trend. It's the moment where abstract becomes tangible.
The cut is the transition. In film, cuts are not neutral — every cut is a choice about where the audience's attention goes next, and how quickly. A slow cut creates contemplation. A fast cut creates urgency. The cut between a problem and a solution can be devastating in its brevity — if it's timed right. In presentations, transitions between sections are usually treated as formatting choices. They should be treated as narrative decisions.
The payoff is the moment the story has been building toward. It's earned, not delivered early. The audience knows they're watching the scene they've been waiting for because of the emotional investment the earlier scenes created. In presentations, the payoff is the slide where the investment, the argument, the evidence, and the ask converge. When it's designed well, the room doesn't just receive it — they feel it.
The TGI Fridays conference
One of the purest applications of filmmaker thinking I've done was the TGI Fridays Global Business Conference work through ADM Productions.
This was a full-stage visual production for a multi-day leadership summit with the theme "Ignite the Future." Hundreds of international franchisees in a physical conference environment. The challenge was to create a visual language that could hold a room full of people across multiple sessions, maintaining energy while delivering strategic content that was inherently complex.
The approach was entirely cinematic. We built the visual identity around a single central image — a deconstructed burger — that we used as a metaphor for how the brand was built. Each layer of the burger represented something: heritage, innovation, the customer relationship, the franchise model. This single visual metaphor became the establishing shot for the whole event. Every subsequent section could reference it, rotate it, deconstruct it further, and the audience always knew where they were in the story.
We then built rhythm into the day through contrast. High-energy motion sequences followed by still, text-heavy moments of reflection. Celebration of the past followed by the provocative question about the future. The pacing was deliberate — we were editing the conference the way a film editor would cut a documentary, thinking not just about what information to present but about when to speed up, when to slow down, and when to pause for the room to feel something before the next thing arrived.
The result was a conference that participants remembered not as "a series of presentations" but as an experience. That's the filmmaker's goal.
Pacing: the thing most presentations get wrong
Film directors understand that pace is not uniform. A great film accelerates and decelerates deliberately. Some scenes are long and slow because the emotional work requires time. Others are fast and fractured because that's the only way to create the specific feeling.
Presentations almost universally get this wrong. The pace is flat — approximately one slide per two minutes for the whole duration, regardless of what's happening on screen or in the room.
But some moments in a presentation require more time than others. A surprising data point deserves silence after it lands. A bold claim needs the room to sit with it for a moment before the evidence starts. A close — the moment where you're asking the room for something — needs to breathe.
For the Intercept Pharmaceuticals training workshop, we built the pacing deliberately into the slide design. Some sections had five slides in two minutes — short, fast, punchy content designed to build energy and momentum. Others had one slide that stayed on screen for ten minutes while the facilitator walked the team through a discussion. The design of each slide signaled its pace to the presenter — sparse, bold visual meant "stay here, let the room talk." Dense, structured content meant "keep moving, this is a pass-through section."
The pacing wasn't a performance choice. It was a design choice. Built into the deck from the beginning.
The echo society deck: editing as storytelling
Echo Society's investor deck was one of the more cinematic projects I've worked on in a pure presentation format.
The founders had real conviction — a genuine disruptive model, a clear perspective on the media landscape, a vision for how content ownership should work. The challenge was that in early conversations, they explained everything. Every nuance, every contingency, every layer of the model. It was thorough and exhausting. The vision kept getting lost inside the explanation.
We built the deck as a film would be built — opening with the disruption (the theft, cinematically speaking), not the solution. The first four slides established a world in which the current media production model robbed creators of their most valuable asset: their IP. No mention of Echo Society. Just the problem, made vivid and specific. This was the setup — the slow burn before the reveal.
Only then did Echo Society appear. Not as a company with a slide full of features, but as the answer to a question the audience was already asking. The reveal was earned because the setup had created genuine tension.
The rest of the deck — the model, the team, the market, the traction — was arranged not to be comprehensive but to sustain and resolve that tension. Every section answered a specific question the investor was now asking because the opening had put the question in their mind.
Investor decks are usually designed to convey all available information. This one was designed to create a feeling — the feeling that this company exists at the exact right moment for the exact right reason. That feeling is what filmmakers call emotional truth. And it's what makes an audience leave wanting to see the next chapter.
The one question to ask before every slide
There's a single filmmaker's question I apply to every slide I build.
Not "what does this slide show?" Not "what information does this slide convey?" But: what does this slide need the audience to feel?
Sometimes the answer is urgency. Sometimes it's confidence. Sometimes it's surprise, or recognition, or possibility, or relief.
When you can answer that question for every slide, the design choices become much clearer. The visual treatment, the amount of text, the typography, the choice of image — all of these choices have a right answer once you know what feeling you're trying to create.
When you can't answer the question — when the slide exists because the information needed to go somewhere — you have an editing problem. You have footage that needs to hit the cutting room floor.
Cut it. Your presentation will be shorter, faster, and more felt for its absence.
That's the filmmaker's gift to presentation design. Not the tools or the vocabulary — though those matter. The discipline of deciding what must be felt, and building everything in service of that. Then cutting everything that isn't.