I don’t love my format here. I like documenting my work, and I like sharing how I make things, but still photos frustrate me. I can’t take pictures while I’m working, so all I can do is put my tools down when I advance part of a model and take a photo of its current state. Work a bit more, put tools down, take photo.

It’s frustrating because the stretches BETWEEN those progress states are the only parts anyone can actually learn from. But I can’t work and take still photos at the same time, so I’m kind of stuck.

Or… maybe not?

My work got me a Beep-Boop two years ago. Beyond its daytime utility, I’ve found it quite awesome over the past year for shooting the model turnaround videos I’ve taken to producing to show off my sculpting and painting projects. However, while I’ve been interested in shooting sculpting tutorial videos, the relatively large size and weight of the tablet made it impractical for this task, as it would need to sit above my workspace in order to capture anything useful.

I pondered this for a while, and finally this week, I decided to sit down and figure out how that might be managed.

I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to hold it in the air, but no matter how that ended up working, I was going to need a cradle to hold the Beep-Boop. Since I had lots of it lying around, I decided to use foamcore.

I traced around the Beep-Boop, and then indicated the area that would need to be cut out to let the camera see through the cradle.

To keep it from moving, I needed rails around the edges. Some quick measurements told me that this would require two layers of foamcore, so I cut out thin strips and started attaching them together; I was planning to use glue, but needed to punch holes in them to let me hold them together with nails while the glue set.

Corresponding holes went into the backing sheet.

Then glue.

This held the Beep-Boop in place pretty nicely. I would later add another thin strip over the bottom to keep it from flipping out, but apparently didn’t get a picture of this until later.

Yes, I need to clean my screen. ~_~

I spent a few days trying to figure out how I planned to hold the cradle in place. I considered wooden or metal dowels, but these seemed like they would be too pliable to span the two feet from one side of my workspace to the other. Anything thicker would either be too heavy or beyond the shaping capabilities of the tools in my apartment.

I eventually rummaged around my closet for answers, and found a pretty perfect solution: a rectangular plastic stick. I think this was originally part of a towel rack I never got around to assembling? Or something? I’m not totally sure, but regardless, it had all of the qualities I needed– it could cross the span of my desk, and was strong without being heavy.

I didn’t have quite as much luck trying to figure out how to hold the rod aloft, so in the end I sort of gave up and built something out of foamcore. This wasn’t a great solution as the resulting uprights are a bit flimsier than I’d like, but they’re what I could manage with the tools on-hand.

To let me adjust the height of the camera, I planned to punch holes at several different heights in the uprights. Tracing the plastic rod gave me the width of these holes, and then I just used a ruler to mark the top and bottom of each one.

Careful knifing punched it all out.

Ta-da! 🙂

Because no part of this project was planned, I got to the point of needing to attach the Beep-Boop cradle to the rod and again had no idea how that would work. More apartment scrounging turned up an old friend: Spud’s endless supply of plastic mushroom containers. Holes cut in the sides would grip around the bar, and then I could attach the container to the back of the cradle somehow.

For some reason I decided that simply gluing it down wouldn’t be enough, so I used more foamcore strips to gird it in place on the back. I left one end open so that I could remove and replace it if the soft plastic ever got damaged.

I sort of expected that this would all be a crappy temporary mock-up of something to be built more solidly later, but to be honest, everything seems really solid now that it’s all together. The iPad sits nicely in the cradle, the cradle solidly grabs the mushroom container, the mushroom container stays fairly still on the bar, and the bar doesn’t wobble as much as I thought it would on the foamcore uprights.

I did an initial test, and while everything went together pretty impressively, the Beep-Boop was just a bit too high up even on the lowest holes, so I took it all apart and added some more even lower ones.

Measure, draw, cut.

This height was pretty much perfect. 🙂

It is by no means a replacement for professional camera equipment, but it’s not bad for a sheet of foamcore and some scrounged apartment garbage. 🙂

Going Forward

So, now that I have this, I’m left with one fairly big question: what am I going to do with it? A few ideas occur to me:

1. Incorporating a few short videos into my articles when I do something interesting during a sculpting project.
2. A set of standalone videos about sculpting fundamentals– holding and applying tools, rigging up an armature, applying clay, building out musculature, and so on. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and now that I have the necessary equipment, I would say the odds of me getting these pumped out before the end of the summer are pretty close to 100%.
3. Maybe long-form recording of me sculpting for hours at a time? Sculpting is a very slow process, and personally I’ve found hours-long videos that don’t skip any details to be tremendously helpful for my own development as a sculptor. If people would find these helpful, it isn’t too hard for me to produce them for some project or other. Now, with that said, the reason I say only “maybe” for this idea is that super-long videos probably have a fairly small potential audience (I just can’t see an average reader/view really caring enough to watch them), and there are some technical limitations that make them a bit annoying– the 40-minute video at the top of this article took 12 hours to export from Premiere. If I recorded 8 hours of video (which is about the fastest I could sculpt a model from start to finish), that would take something like 140 hours to export. @_@ So I’d like to do this, but I would have to be sure that the interest exists before I commit to it.
4. I’ve dug around on YouTube, and it looks like it would be quite simple to run a sculpting livestream, potentially including the ability for people to ask questions that I could answer while I work. As with #3 above, this could only happen if I knew there was some interest, so let me know if this is something you’d potentially join on some random Saturday or Sunday.

So, yeah. I can do a new thing, and I’m not sure right now what exactly I want to do with that thing. If you have any suggestions or requests, absolutely let me know in the comments below. Your feedback will have a direct impact on the video content I do or don’t pursue over the next few months.

Also welcomed feedback: “This doesn’t interest me.”

Because if nobody wants this, I’d rather know now. 🙂

-Spud