TED Earth Speech and Clint Eastwood

For my two videos I chose to focus on the TED speech given about how the Earth came into being and the Clint Eastwood speech from the Republican National Convention.

As for the TED speech, I think for the subject matter, the speaker did a great job of keeping the audience interested in what he was walking about. It was not a subject matter I particularly follow regularly, but he was able to present it using enough graphs and pictures and timelines to keep my attention. The target audience was probably a group of scientists or science students who are very interested in what he was talking about. They probably knew most of the things he was referring to, where I did not. He used a good hook in the beginning with the scrambling of the egg (although has the presentation went on, it seemed kind of out of place), and a good ending with showing a picture of his grandson and tying that in. He was a good public speaker and did not have any quirks or traits that were noticeable to the audience and it was obvious he was educated on the matter of the speech. He had a clear beginning, middle, and end, to his speech which is always important. Overall, I think the speech was effective.

Clint Eastwood's speech at the RNC was very ineffective, in my opinion. He clearly did not write anything before hand because he kept bouncing around between ideas and I realize he is elderly, but he is not a good public speaker. He did not use enough facts to make his speech memorable. His audience were clearly RNC supporters, but Republican or not, the speech was not effective. The idea of the empty chair was a good one, and had he rehearsed and use more factual information, it had the potential to be a great speech. I did not come away from viewing the speech as moved or motivated, which I think is vital for any effective speech. The empty chair idea was a good one, and with a written speech and rehearsal could have been very effective. But in the end, the speech was a flop and the only reason it got so much attention was because Clint Eastwood was standing on stage rambling on with an empty chair.