What on earth is PechaKucha? A fair question. PechaKucha (Japanese for “chit-chat”) is an organisation created in 2003, who host an evening of spoken presentations across the globe – in a similar vein to TEDx.

Since its inception in Tokyo, 2003, PechaKucha Nights now take place in over 700 cities worldwide, Sheffield being the 300th! PechaKucha Nights have been held in bars, clubs, student unions, disused prisons, beaches, and even a quarry!

Aimed at creatives and media-types, each PechaKucha Night is driven by their unique presentation style in which the speaker’s twenty slides automatically advance after twenty seconds. It’s called 20×20 and results in a six-minute forty-second talk, thus keeping the presentations short and concise. Each ‘volume’ usually has six or seven speakers and you can expect short films and other entertainment interspersing the talks.

Each city’s PechaKucha contingent is run by volunteers. Sheffield’s organises are Jonny Douglas and Pennie Raven and Vol#16 took place on November 20th, 2014, at The Foundry. The theme was ‘Pushing The Envelope’ and featured six speakers, short films, and a dance performance.

One of the speakers presenting at the event, Jedde de Vries, runs the Capoeira School Sheffield and had choreographed a performance with his sparring partner, Greg, for the interval of the PechaKucha event. Myself – yes, i must declare a potential bias here – and Ted Bowron are both third year Digital Media Production students working with PechaKucha for our final year projects. We collaborated with Jedde to create a visual accompaniment for the dance where the dancers could interact with silhouettes, à la Apple’s iPod adverts, which would be projected onto a screen behind them (see the image below).

Photo courtesy of Andy Brown

We shot the dancers on a green screen, which was far too small, before embarking on a laborious process of frame-by-frame masking, roto-brush, and chromakey work to create the effect we wanted. As is always the case with these things, we worked up to the wire, literally – a couple of adjustments were made during rehearsals on the day of the event.

The end result was very effective and went down really well with the sizeable crowd who had gathered at The Foundry for PechaKucha Sheffield Vol#16. The dancers performed three dances alongside their silhouettes as Ted and I stood at the back hoping completely confident it would all stay in time. It did. Phew.

The dances took place in the interval and the rest of the evening consisted of fabulous talks from Vanessa Toulmin, Tom Pepper, Liam Garcia, Felicity Hoy, Jedde de Vries, John Wilson. A podcast of the event is available here and gives a real flavour of what a PechaKucha Night is like.

The final result

The next PechaKucha Sheffield, Vol#17, is on Thursday 12th March at the Theatre Delicatessen North on The Moor (perhaps better remembered as the old Woolworths), doors open at 19:30. The theme for this volume is ‘Put Up or Shut Up’ and for more information please visit www.pechakucha.org/cities/sheffield.

PechaKucha is a terrific evening’s entertainment and well worth the entry fee. You will laugh, you might cry, but you will definitely learn something and you will definitely be entertained.

If your motto, like mine, is to know more today than you did yesterday, then PechaKucha is right up your alley. Or bar, or club, or disused prison, or old Woolworths…