So I introspected what I did and realized something I didn't include in the post.

I was under a time crunch to memorize my talk (I think I started about 4-6 hours before) so the sentences were a way to speed that along.

The process went like this:

1. Read talk end to end out loud from sentences

2. Start trying to time sentences with slides (with sentences still there)

3. Remove sentences but see all the slides still

4. Only see the current slide

Took me about 2-3 hours to nail down. By step 3 and 4 I was already improvising most of the sentences each time though and only the core point stayed constant.