Subsequent slide, please: A short historical past of the company presentation

Earlier than PowerPoint, and lengthy earlier than digital projectors, 35-millimeter movie slides have been king. Greater, clearer, and cheaper to supply than 16-millimeter movie, and extra colourful and higher-resolution than video, slides have been the one medium for the sorts of high-impact displays given by CEOs and high brass at annual conferences for stockholders, workers, and salespeople. Identified within the enterprise as “multi-image” exhibits, these displays required a small military of producers, photographers, and stay manufacturing employees to tug off. First the complete present needed to be written, storyboarded, and scored. Pictures have been chosen from a library, photograph shoots organized, animations and particular results produced. A white-gloved technician developed, mounted, and dusted every slide earlier than dropping it into the carousel. 1000’s of cues have been programmed into the present management computer systems—then examined, and examined once more. As a result of computer systems crash. Projector bulbs burn out. Slide carousels get jammed. 

“Once you consider all of the machines, all of the connections, all of the completely different bits and items, it’s a miracle this stuff even performed in any respect,” says Douglas Mesney, a industrial photographer turned slide producer whose firm Unbelievable Slidemakers produced the 80-­projector Saab launch. Now 77 years outdated, he’s made a retirement venture of archiving the now-forgotten slide enterprise. Mesney pivoted to producing multi-image exhibits within the early Nineteen Seventies after an encounter with a formidable six-screen setup on the 1972 New York Boat Present. He’d been taking pictures spreads for Penthouse and automotive magazines, often lugging a Kodak projector or two to pitch conferences for promoting shoppers. “Swiftly you have a look at six projectors and what they’ll do, and also you go, Holy mackerel,” he remembers. 

“Swiftly you have a look at six projectors and what they’ll do, and also you go, Holy mackerel.”

Douglas Mesney, a industrial photographer

Six was only the start. On the peak of Mesney’s profession, his exhibits referred to as for as much as 100 projectors braced collectively in vertiginous rigs. With a number of projectors pointing towards the identical display screen, he might create seamless panoramas and complicated animations, all synchronized to tape. Though the danger of catastrophe was at all times excessive, when he pulled it off, his exhibits dazzled audiences and made company fits seem like giants. Mesney’s shoppers included IKEA, Saab, Kodak, and Shell; he commanded manufacturing budgets within the tons of of hundreds of {dollars}. And within the multi-image enterprise, that was low-cost. Bigger A/V staging corporations, like Carabiner Worldwide, charged as much as $1 million to orchestrate company conferences, jazzing up their generic multi-­picture “modules” with laser mild exhibits, dance numbers, and top-shelf expertise like Corridor & Oates, the Allman Brothers, and even the Muppets. “I liken it to being a rock-and-roll roadie, however I by no means went on the tour bus,” explains Susan Buckland, a slide programmer who spent most of her profession behind the display screen at Carabiner.