36. Go in the Right Direction

A Presentation Lesson from Akira Kurosawa

During his long and distinguished career, the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa pioneered many innovative cinematic techniques that are applicable to today’s presentation graphics. One is Mr. Kurosawa’s creative use of the Wipe, a filmic transition between scenes in which a new image slides across an existing image and replaces it—like a curtain being drawn across the screen.

In today’s fast-cut action films, the Wipe has fallen out of favor, but the effect is very useful in presentations where fast cuts can be jarring to an audience. More about speeds in a moment, but first let’s look at how Mr. Kurosawa used Wipes in his 1952 film, Ikiru.

Ikiru, which means “to live” in Japanese, is a story about a man dying of terminal cancer; it was inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a novel by Leo Tolstoy. Two more recent films, Biutiful and Beginners, deal with the same personal subject, but Mr. Kurosawa provided an extra dimension to his film by adding social commentary—and expressing his point of view with the Wipe effect.

The leading character in Ikiru is a career civil servant in post-World War II Japan where stultifying bureaucracy weighs heavily on a Japanese society trying to recover. To illustrate that situation, a group of mothers shows up at a government office to lodge a complaint about a sewage pond in their neighborhood, but the bureaucrats duck their responsibility by sending the mothers to another office, and then to another, and another, giving them the runaround.

Mr. Kurosawa depicts the runaround in a montage of 16 very short scenes, transitioning from one office to another with the Wipe effect. The first nine Wipes alternate left and right, but the last seven all move to the left. As you read in Chapter 33, “Jon Stewart’s Right,” because audiences read from left to right, you should design, animate, and display your presentation graphics so that—depending on the message you want to convey—your graphics follow or fight that predisposition. Movement to the right creates positive perceptions, movement to the left negative.

In Ikiru, the crescendo of leftward moves builds to create a negative perception of the bureaucrats. Film historian Stephen Prince, who provided the commentary track on the Criterion Collection version of the film, called the montage “an assembly which is basically a Rogues’ Gallery of scoundrels.”¹

The lesson for presenters is: If you want to send a negative message to discuss your competition, for example, use the Wipe Left transition. But if you want to create a positive perception of your own company, use the Wipe Right.

A note about speed: In all versions of PowerPoint prior to 2010, the Wipe Right transition moves at a fast speed with a hard edge, creating that curtain-across-the-screen effect. In the 2010 version, the default for the Wipe Right transition moves at a slower speed with a soft edge, creating the effect of a dissolve, and slowing down the transition. This is not to say that you revert to the machine gun cutting that most of our movies use today; instead, use the Wipe Right as your preferred transition, but change the speed from the default of one second to a quarter of a second.

Give your audiences positive perceptions, not a Rogues’ Gallery of scoundrels.