Drawing hairs before midnight

PaperFaces portrait of @LizzieBeth_. For this portrait I decided to make one of those most excellent speed drawing videos you see all over YouTube. In the past I used AirPlay on my iPad to mirror its display to my iMac that was running Reflector to capture the screen. This process has worked out great but since it only records the screen you miss out on actually seeing how I draw with a stylus.

To record the video below I used some knowledge I picked up last year when I created a pregnancy time-lapse of my wife and twin girls. Basically I setup my dSLR camera on a tripod behind me and tethered it to my iMac through a USB cable so I could use software to snap photographs every couple of seconds.

After grabbing around 1,000 images I imported them into Adobe AfterEffects as an image sequence, did some quick color corrections, added titles and music, and uploaded to YouTube.

The lighting kind of sucks and the focus is off in a few parts, but I think it came out ok for my second time-lapse attempt. Next time I’ll take more care to get my white balance correct upfront and make sure I don’t bump into the tripod midway through the shoot.

Tools used:

• Pogo Connect Bluetooth Smart Pen
• Paper by WeTransfer