„Crazy with Prezi“ and the decapitation of oxes in Korčula

“The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.” ― Alain de Botton

Surely you have experienced that because of the amount of your current commitments you get a feeling that you will not be able to get anything done. In these situations the clock somehow goes faster, deadlines are screaming out of every door at once, and all of a sudden there is the face of Mr Edward Aloysius Murphy with the evil smile, because his famous law says that ”Everything that can go wrong, probably will”. And again, it does. When you are getting ready for a number of things and you are wondering how in the world you will make it all, the usual thing that happens is – more tasks – and ofcourse they are new, unplanned and urgent.

Such moment are common in Istra Inspirit, and we have trully become doctors of science when it comes to dealing with stress or converting stress into motivation. When I think I will not be able to coordinate all of my obligations in college with those at work there is an image instantly creating in my head – the image of our boss Manuela at 3 after midnight, hitting her laptop keys and writing some project, because the inspiration catches her in the weirdest hours and, well, she has no time during the day for this. And the interesting part is, the more work she has, the faster and better she performs.

This time it was about preparing the presentation which Manuela will give on 12th of December on the Tourism forum of Istria to present all the achievements of Istra Inspirit since the beggining of the project to this date. Aware that Manu is not a person who will follow the boring structure of Power Point presentation and slides full of texts, we decided to make a presentation in a new programe called Prezi, which allows creating a more dynamic and attractive presentation. The fact that we have never used Prezi before – we thought – wouldn’t be problem. And then it all started. We put a sign ”Crazy with Prezi until Friday” and we started our adventure. Parallel to this, my own personal adventure started – creating a presentation for my next class in college – on the most interesting but highly controversial custom of decapitating oxes on the Island of Korčula.

Well, at least it was supposed to begin…

What did begin were our troubles with Prezi: when we put down all the topics Manu will talk about (and realised they already take almoust two A4 pages), we started designing the ”slides” shaped in circles, which will represent these topics. This limited area had to be filled with no less than 83 images that will show what we did in these last 3 years. Also, we experienced the problems with the diacritic characters and ‘saving’ the presentation according to the principle ”a piece on-line – a piece on-computer” (and as you imagine – the internet failed repeatedly), impossibility to adjust fonts or font size, working late hours and early mornings…..these were just some of the benefits of working with Prezi. Then Thursday arrived, the day before the ”D-Day”. We had the major rehearsal to see if Prezi presentation will work on Friday. As I feared – it did not work on any computer other than the one it was made one. Without any hope that I will find a solution by Friday morning, I moved my thoughts away from Prezi. The oxes of Korčula were still waiting for me at home. Of course, by this time, the thought of doing a presentation for my class tomorrow did not even have the courage to cross my mind. I sold my professor the story of how the Power Point presentations, or any presentations for that matter, were the thing of the past, and started explaining to the class, using my arms and legs, and what ever I could find to be useful, how these poor creatures used to be beheaded. Was this brave or crazy? I don’t know. In any case, I hope my professor will not be reading this and if he does – ”Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental”. The rest of my day, evening and night was again reserved for adjusting the Prezi that maybe would not even work the day after…

At 4:55 AM I was awakened by Ognjen’s e-mail. He managed to edit and finish the video of our art director Petra and the final preparation for Manu’s presentations could begin….

A few hours later we were standing at the Lone hotel , still uncertain whether this all will work and me trying to hide my panic. We listen to the opening remarks, the awards ceremony for the „Zlatna koza – Capra d’oro“ reward, speeches on EU Structural Funds,  on diffused hotels….

And then the moment of truth came…

„In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.“ – Bill Cosby

(to be continued…)