Last Thursday I finished filming the last of the pre-recorded videos for my current course Sketchbook Design and I celebrated this event by doing two sketches. My usual way to celebrate things! (Note: I still have 6 x 1 hour livestreams to do so it’s not the last video for the course!)

It was a great feeling to finish what turned out to be a 2.5 month process.  For the last few courses I have hired a videographer and we’ve done all the filming in a few days, so it was really nice to be able to do this at a more leisurely pace. Finding examples for each lesson was a big job and so spreading the filming sessions out was really the only way to do it anyway. Find out more about the process here.

I live in a very small apartment so I had to move furniture and do a lot of rearranging in order to create the layout for filming a course. So it was important to document the exact positions of all the equipment so I can recreate it later. It was fun to get out my measuring tape and my scale ruler and do a very accurate measured drawing. It’s at a scale of 1:20.

I also wanted to sketch what it was like to be surrounded by four cameras for the last few months and record some of the tech issues I had. This sketch is not an accurate view as Cam 3 is above me and Cam 4 behind me.

Why four cameras? Well Cam 2 is ‘B-roll’ for Cam 1 when I’m talking to the camera, and Cam 4 is ‘B-roll’ for Cam 3. Cam 4 was the hardest to do on my own as normally one of the guys (standing in the corner of the room) is manually zooming in and following my hand movements. Cam 2 is my least favourite (it’s pretty obvious why!) but my videographer said that it was important to be zoomed in to reduce continuity issues!

Before I started filming, my videographer came over to adjust my setup and at one stage referred to Cam 1 as the main camera. I laughed at the time saying “I think of Cam 3 (the overhead one) as the main camera!” But I’ve now realised how important Cam 1 really is. When I’m filming this is the camera which I’m talking to, and in fact, I imagine that I’m looking in the eyes of the participants and trying to make sure that they are following along. This connection with the participants is so important, even in the pre-recorded videos! When I start filming a course I still feel a little uncomfortable initially being on camera but once I get into it, my desire to share the content with others takes over and that becomes my focus.

Anyway, it feels good to have two sketches recording this massive part of my life for the last few months… but it feels even better to have my work area back to normal! I can actually freely move around the space now without having to worry about cameras everywhere.

Finally… just to let you know that I’m going to focus on my blog more in January and not worry so much about Instagram. So I hope to post more shorter articles, sharing what I’m thinking right after doing my sketches – just like the old days of blogging.