Lost in Translation

The word (great) is in parenthesis above because I don't claim to have all of the secrets, but here is the basic strategy I used for our presentation.

1) Start with your script. It's best to center the script around one basic idea. In our first presentation we used the idea of "A new perspective on Colombia." This time I used a comparison between the operation that rescued Ingrid Betancourt and Operation Cali, which will be the effort to rescue people from spiritual darkness in Cali. Read your script out loud several times and have another person read it to help you evaluate it.

2) Record your script. I used our church's sound system in Colombia to record it.

3) Pick your music. For our script I used about five different tracks to go along with the script. A site that I used was Audiosarx. Since a missionary presentation is an educational use of the music I was able to purchase two tracks for about $2 each. You can search based on mood and style. I also purchased another track or two from Amazon.

3) Edit your recorded script and mix the music. Thanks to my ministry partner José for the idea to download a 30-day trial version of Adobe Audio Adition. Excellent program! I was able to fix up a few errors in my recorded script and mix the tracks together to make the final version of the sound track.

4) Organize and edit your fotos and backgrounds for the presentation. I used Photoshop Elements 2.0 for this task. Elements (now available in a more advanced version) is cheap and great for this kind of thing. I bought a book before we got to the field on using the program and it was worth every penny. You can make some very professional looking slides. I used flickr.com to find many photos for the presentation. I use Advanced Search and search for photos that are licensed under a Creative Commons license, which can be used for non-profit stuff. Just be careful because sometimes photos show up that are not helpful spiritually, although that is rare if you're using search terms for a missionary presentation.

5) Put the photos into the presentation and sync to the sound track. I'm at this step right now. We use Scala's iPlay Studio (now a legacy product) as our presentation program. It can sync each image to a hundredth of a second. I think that it costs about $60 and you can google it's name to find it.

This process has definitely gotten easier since we did it six years ago. We didn't use any of the above websites, which make the process a lot easier.