• How the music is appropriate or not appropriate for the show theme. This is very judgemental. I was marked down in one show because the music had lyrics which one judge felt were distracting. This was a program on Australia and I used Australian folk music.
  
  
• How you handle the equipment. For slides each individual has to supply their own equipment, and the judges comment on how it was conducted. I don't think that I received any negative comments in this area. The equipment range from very sophisticated to extremely simple. One of the best shows that I saw was on the faces of China by Dale O'Bannion of Portland. He used a projector with the self timer and a boom box with the music. It was outstanding in my opinion.
  
  A few comments on the flow of the program or how it was put together;
  
  
• Bright slides and dark slides all mixed can be distracting. Showing a vertical slide, then a horizontal slide, then another verticle slide can be distracting.
  
  
• Consider the continunity of the program in that you don't jump from one subject to another without a transition.
  
  
• The length of time that a slide was on the screen is judged. ( I have had one judge think that I left them on to long, while another felt that I should have given more time for people to see the slide.)

How many slides do you need?

I did a calculation on the number of images multiplied by the time each is projected for several periods of time:

For a 2-minute program you would need 24 slides if you left each one on for 5 seconds, 15 slides at 8 seconds each, and 12 slides at 10 seconds each.

For a 5 minute program you would need 60 slides for a 5-second display and 30 for a 10-second display.

If you had 80 slides and you showed each for 6 seconds you would have an 8 minute program.

Other Comments

According to the literature I have read on programs you should not have all the slides on for the same length of time or the audience will soon anticipate the change.

Don't use music that the audience knows or they will pay more attention to the music than they will to the images.

One last item. In the current (January, 2006) issue of the PSA Journal there is an article on the mechanics of an essay.