How I Film and Light My iPad Drawing Videos

As I've been making more and more videos, one of the things I've struggled with the most is getting good quality overhead shots while I'm drawing on the iPad, and I watched a ton and ton of tutorials on how to get good overhead shots, and so many of them are geared towards open box opening videos or open boxing videos. Boxing? Package opening videos? What are those videos called? There's all kinds of videos about those, but those are great for showing you how to mount a camera overhead for the most part, but what they don't address are things that are unique to drawing on an iPad, which is dealing with, like, reflection, because a lot of these videos tell you to just light directly overhead, and when you do that on an iPad, you get a ton of glare. I had to figure out different ways to try different ways to light the screen without getting reflection, and also not having my hands in, like, a weird dark shadow, because that looks weird, too. The other issue I ran into is that most of these setups require you mounting, like, an arm to your desk to film down onto that desk. What I ran into while I was drawing on the iPad is that I would, like, lean on the desk a little bit drawing, and it would wobble a little bit, and then the video footage would be wobbly. Nobody wants to get seasick while they're watching a drawing video, so I may do for a while just trying to, like, be very careful as I was drawing, but that's not ideal. Can't be worrying about how I'm leaning while I'm drawing something. So anyway, getting these overhead shots set up in my old office took so much time, where I was just, like, constantly messing with lights and, like, moving the camera, trying to get the camera level. Just wasted a ton of time. So I knew that when I had this new office, one of the first things I was going to do was set up an additional workspace that was just for filming the iPad, and it was all set up and ready to go. So this here is my current setup. I think I'm getting pretty decent shots. I still need to tweak a few things here and there, but I'm pretty happy with it. But even in just the short time I've been in this office, I went through a lot of different iterations, some a bit more ridiculous than others, but you can see remnants on the wall and on the ceiling from different things that I attempted. But let me show you what I have that's working pretty well for me. Okay, so this is what we got going on here. I'm using the same monitor mount that I saw recommended in a bunch of different videos on how to make, like, a DIY overhead rig. I mounted this to a shelf instead of my desk. So the shelf wasn't very sturdy. If you look closely, you'll see that I have, like, a random little bracket drilled to support it even more. So now that this is mounted on a shelf, I don't have to worry about leaning on the desk too much and shaking it. If we look towards the end of the arm, you can see where I took off the mount, the VESA mount that would connect to a monitor, and then I just put a bolt through that was the same size as the hole in this, like, pivoting tripod head, and that's how I attached the camera. So I just attached the pivoting ball head, I think that's what it's called, to the arm and then the camera onto that. These monitor arms also have really nice cable management things built into them, so I'm able to run the USB-C cord to a plug in the wall so that the camera is always being powered and I don't have to worry about batteries. Which reminds me, I got this really cool plug on Amazon that has additional outlets, but it also has a USB-C and USB-A outlet in it, so I just plug that directly into this new outlet thing and it's powering my camera. And I can easily just pivot this ball head if I want to shoot, like, a vertical video. And since I have the new standing desk for my main desk, I have a height adjustable desk for the iPad as well, so this is really helpful if I want to raise or lower the iPad for different view angles. So for lighting, I use this giant softbox thing because apparently, to get the least amount of glare and the softest light, you need the biggest diffusion you can get. I got this one by Godox, and then I just have it bouncing the light off of a piece of foam board, which is just leaning on a random arm that I have attached to a previous attempt at a mounting system. But as you can see, the table is well lit, but there's no glare on the iPad itself.