1) Page Orientation matters. Typically, I sketch landscape. During the first capture, my sketchbook was positioned portrait but I still sketched landscape. I have no reasonable explanation for this choice and it made for some awkward writing as I reach the “top” of the page. Note the slant and progressively less-readable text as you move up the page.

2) Comfort matters. The keynotes were in a theater setting and I needed a tabletop to set up my sketchbook, Mac, and IPEVO USB camera. The tech guys graciously shared the sound booth with me. However, the sound booth isn’t really designed for tabletop use. The seats and chairs are elevated so technicians have a bird’s eye view of the entire theater while also having access to their sound equipment. The elevation takes one further from the table top which meant I was alternatively kneeling or standing during my first attempt which wasn’t ideal especially for almost an hour! The second attempt, there was a lower chair that made such a difference! Now I could sit and focus on sketching.

View from the Sound booth before the Closing Keynote.

Sketchnote Capture #2 Setup. Note the Landscape Orientation (Lesson Learned!) and the use of random bag items to increase the height of the Document Camera.

3) Audio matters. The raw footage of both sketchnote captures have poor audio quality. I was hoping to use some snippets of the captures with audio during future trainings as an example of “I hear this and this is how it is translated on the page” but that is not possible yet. I could rely on captions of the footage for this purpose but don’t think it would achieve the desired effect. Next time, rather than the internal microphone see what happens with a quality external microphone.

Here’s the Final Products along with their one-minute time lapse videos.

Sketchnote #1 Capture.