Drawing is one of my favourite ways to share and co-create thoughts. 🥰 In a online meeting heavy time I kind of felt at a loss 😅, but in this blogpost, you’ll find my slightly nerdy way to still share my drawings with you. 🤩 Time to SHOW what you think and stream what you think by using your hands and draw your thoughts!
I found that just explaining something through voice over a conference call isn’t optimal, because an important aspect was missing. I fixed this already in the real world by drawing a lot during meetings.
Now I needed to fix it for online. Now, there are a some of tablet based drawing tools that can also stream, but I like a more hands on approach, that works with limited means. Check out my video, photos with list and the shopping list below.
My setup: Webcam and Computer
Above you can see my setup. It’s really easy:
- Microphone stand with boom arm on the table
- Ball joint on the boom arm tip
- Ball joint screwed into the webcam base (a real cheap webcam I had laying around)
- Webcam connected to my computer via USB.
- Computer running a browser and navigated to whereby.com
So, what’s up with the blue tape markers? Well, that’s the area that’s recorded. So if I need to keep things out of frame, like an extra screen with the chat, or extra pens and rulers, I know exactly where to put them.
My mobile phone setup
This setup I roughly copied from Nick Shabazz, who is a knife reviewer. His channel is a so called ‘talking hands’ channel, so he only shows his hands and the camera is pointed to his table and in Nicks case: his knives.
This setup is perhaps even easier:
- Microphone stand with boom arm on the table
- Ball joint on the boom arm tip
- Ball joint screwed into the phone clamp I took from a selfie stick.
- Phone is clamped in the phone clamp, screen up, camera down and running the whereby.com app.
- I could add a long USB power cable so I can stream indefinitely, but I forgot to add that in the photo.
Stuff you need
Okay, so is this expensive? I don’t think so. Excluding your choice of webcam, I calculated it to be 50 to 60 euros, depending where you shop.
Here’s my shopping list:
A nice and sturdy microphone stand with boom. I choose this K&M because it has a heavy, padded base and just the right height, without being too big, or ‘in the way’ on even small tables. Alternatively, you can use pretty much any stand, as long as it can reach over your work area and keep the area where your hands are free.
Because I choose a microphone stand with boom I also needed a flexible place to articulate my webcam on/ affix my selfy-stick-iphone-clamp to. This ball joint does the trick pretty well. With this ball joint you can screw right into the base of most webcams.
Almost finally you’ll need a mobile phone clamp if you’re going to use a mobile phone. This one of Manfrotto might seem like overkill (it’s a big name brand for photography), but I only have one phone, so I like it to be as secure as possible, so it won’t drop out.
And finally a thread adaptor to make the clamp fit to the stand …
Update: I’ve refined my setup a bit.