Overhead Camera Setup for Drawing

Hey, Eric here with 30x40 Design Workshop. Today we're gonna do a quick video on my overhead sketching setup. A lot of people have been asking, what do I use, how do I set it up? I thought I'd take you to the other side of the lens and show you a couple of really simple ways I use to do this. Okay, so this is kind of my preferred setup here. DSLR, this is the 70D. I also have the 6D Mark II. Then it's a tripod, and this is the Manfrotto 055. This has a center column, which moves up and cantilevers out. And that allows me to position the camera directly over the work surface. Now this has a video head on it. The video head allows me to tilt the camera up and down, but you don't need something certainly this fancy. So the important thing with this is getting the camera directly over the work surface. And you want the plane of the camera's sensor to be parallel with the work surface here. And the reason for that is, if you were to tilt this camera out of vertical plane here, it ends up skewing the work surface. You can see as you're recording, this is actually upside down. So when I get this into post, into Final Cut Pro, I'm gonna end up rotating this 180 degrees. So it looks like it's right side up. If you skew the camera like this, it skews the plane of the work surface. And then when I rotate it 180 degrees, it looks like it's upside down. It looks awkward. It's difficult to watch. Now, one of the other reasons why I like using a DSLR is because I can put a lens on here, a zoom lens that allows me to change the framing of this. This column here allows me to bring the camera far enough away from the legs that I can capture a fairly large work surface. If you only have access to a small tripod like this, oftentimes you'll get these tripods free with a camera purchase. And you wanna mount your camera in here. You're gonna need to find a way to tilt the back leg up so you can position your camera like this so that it's not capturing the front two legs here. Having the center column is nice because it allows you to counterweight and counterbalance this so that your camera can be very far away from these legs. And it gives you a lot of working room. The other components of the tripod that make this work, you can see I have a bungee cord here. And if I didn't have that bungee cord, you can see how the center column and the weight of the DSLR just basically unweights the entire tripod. So all this does is keeps it from tipping over. And I have a chair there with a backpack that has some stone samples in it so it's acting as a counterweight. That allows me to move this camera very far forward and I don't have to worry about the field of view here. Changing the field of view with a zoom lens is really nice. It allows you to focus and recompose. And also it helps with the diversity of shots that you can get because you can get real tight shots and real wide shots of your work surface here. Okay, so the next component here is a light. This is the Aputure 120D. This is a daylight balanced single source LED light. This is paired with the light dome that is creating this large diffuse light element here, which is nicely illuminating this work surface. When you're thinking about lighting, you wanna think about the direction of light and also the hand with which you're sketching. So being a right-handed person, ideally this light would be coming from this side. I want you to be able to see it. That's why I've positioned it here. If you're left-handed, this is a great direction because it illuminates your work surface without casting a lot of shadows onto what you're actually drawing. It may actually be counterintuitive, but you actually do want some level of shadow on the drawing. If you were to completely diffusely light this work surface so that there were no shadows, it's actually gonna appear unnatural. So you want to evenly illuminate the surface, but you also want to have some directionality to that light. If you don't have access to a light like this, and this is a pretty expensive light, you can just position your desk near a window or a door. So natural daylight is the best light source you can possibly find, but it can be difficult to control that if you have bright, direct sunlight and the shadows are very harsh. You get a very contrasty look. So what's nice is being able to have some diffusion membrane. You can actually hang a piece of paper up in front of that if the bright sunlight is too much, or you can control it in some other way with some Mylar sheeting or something like that. Okay, next we're gonna talk about work surface here. This is one of my all-time favorite work surfaces. This is the self-healing cutting mat made by Alvin. It's got two colors. There's a green side to it, which I don't use very often, and the black side here. I think one of the best cases for choosing this cutting mat as a surface is it helps you to align the field of view with your camera's sensor. So having these grid lines allows you to tilt and turn and make sure that you're perpendicular to the field of view in your lens. Think about contrast when you're choosing a background. With the craft paper, I really like the black. The black also works well with white or cream-colored sketch paper. There's also natural wood surfaces and textures. There's melamine, MDF, there's MDO. There are veneer plywoods. There are tile samples. There's the concrete floor, which I absolutely love. Neutral surfaces that provide contrast to your sketching media are really the best that you can find. So this setup is probably the top-of-the-line setup. You have an expensive tripod. You have an expensive DSLR. You have an expensive lens. You have an expensive daylight-balanced LED light, but you don't need all this gear to record an overhead sketching video of yourself. Let's look at another option. So the less expensive alternative. Now, this is a friction arm. Now, I use this for recording things above my drafting table here, so I have my computer set up here, but this is also a great place for me to just sit and sketch, and also I can record my computer screen if I tilt it the right way. So you can see right here, this is a friction arm that's mounted to the loft framing member, and I'll show you how I did that in a minute. So the difference here is we have to use a much lighter weight setup to work with the friction arm. The friction arm is essentially a floppy articulating set of joints. There's a joint here, here, and here, and there's a C-clamp on one end. You have the ability to take the C-clamp off, which exposes this threaded screw here, and this can be screwed into a threaded nut, which I've then drilled into the framing members up here. Now, that threaded nut can be drilled into homosote, it can be drilled into wood paneling, it can be drilled into a two-by-four that you just sort of prop up somewhere, so it's really versatile, but the way this friction arm works is that there's a crank here, and when you crank down on this, it locks all of the articulating joints from moving. The C-clamp allows you to mount these friction arms almost anywhere. So you can see here I've used the C-clamp just to mount to the tip of a microphone boom that I picked up on Amazon. These boom arms are about $15 each. I'll put all the links in the cards for all of these materials. Pair that with the friction arm and a mount for your smartphone, and you have a really simple, quick, effective way of recording your process. Interesting thing about the friction arm is that it allows you to get into places and capture perspectives that you wouldn't be able to capture with a DSLR because the DSLR is so bulky. They make larger friction arms, but none so large as to hold, say, a full-frame 6D Mark II like I'm recording on here. So really, these are geared toward sort of smartphones and smaller sensor cameras, but they actually work fine just for documenting your work in a real basic fashion. So these are inexpensive enough. They can grab three or four of them and position them all around, and chances are you probably haven't even noticed them in the studio. I have one on the opposite loft, I have one here, and then I have one on a light stand, which just allows me to mount a whole series of cameras and capture process. That's what's cool about these, that just popping your cell phone in one and hitting record is so easy now that really there is no excuse not to record and document your process. All right, so I hope this video was helpful. I hope you found something here that you can take and go make things with. Gear is not important at all. It is what you do with the stuff you have on hand. So please go out there and make things, and we'll see you again next time. Cheers, my friends.