Disney Educational Games Shooting Day: Whiteboard Scenes (Patreon)

I love illustrating my own videos, but it's never a simple thing to accomplish. My vision for this part of the video originally involved a chalk board, for that added "Educational" effect. Sometimes you just need some interesting visuals to spice up an information dump.

I went to the craft store and found the only chalk board I could find. Fun thing about chalk board chalk though, it doesn't glide like sidewalk chalk does, which makes it nearly impossible to do these quick illustrations with. Then I thought I could use a Wacom tablet and Photoshop to recreate the look of a chalkboard digitally. Though I did use tablets in high school, I'm extremely rusty, and re-learning it was just too time consuming. So I fell back to the tried and true Draw My Life method: whiteboard. I always grew up with whiteboards in school anyway, so maybe it's even more authentic this way for my age group.

Fun thing about whiteboards though is that they're highly reflective. In order to film it at a decent angle without glare from my ring light (I don't have the budget for a lighting kit so I work with what I've got) I needed to bounce the light off of a blank wall, which in my tiny apartment was no easy task.

I had to move quite a bit of furniture around to make it possible. This is the same method I had to use to film the GameBoy screen for the Tilt and Tumble video. Fortunately as reflective as whiteboards are, they're not nearly as bad as those GameBoy Colors. I learned later from one of my creator friends that a polarizing filter for my camera would have helped immensely. Add it to the list of stuff I can't afford yet, ha.

To help keep track of it all, I had a few mock ups that I had drawn out to use as references for my whiteboard sketches, since it doesn't work for the video if I have to keep erasing parts of the drawing for mistakes. It had to be one clean sketch from start to finish, drawn at an arms length away as not to block the camera or the light. I had to hold my legs in a squat for about 5 hours to accomplish this.

I'll never understand why these lights that are designed to be mounted on 3 foot tall tripods only have 5 foot long cords. This is the amount of space I have to work with to film in my tiny apartment! Even though sometimes seemingly simple ideas end up being an ordeal to film, I think usually the work shows through in the final product.