Hear Me Draw
I just did my first ever Sketchcast over at Codswallop and I found the experience quite strange.
For years my teaching method was to speak while I write and doodle on a whiteboard. That felt natural and fun. For some reason recording my voice while trying to draw didn’t really work for me. Perhaps with better equipment and practice I would get better at it.
Sketchcasting is a cool idea. Apparently my old Performancing colleague Patrick is behind the service, based on an idea by Richard Ziade (watch the video, it’s cool).
Watching some of the other users videos and reading commentary about the service (you can see more links in my post) made me think that this audio and visual experience will become more popular. Up to now text has dominated, and I don’t think it is going to go away, but mixing in different presentation styles has potential to keep a blog interesting and add variety.
I have been watching Darrens videos with a lot of interest. Perhaps once I have moved and my office is set back up I should try to embarass myself even further with some video …
Have you tried Sketchcast? Done any video or podcasting? Got any tips to share? You know what to do, tell us what you think in the comments 
Posted on September 25th, 2007 by Chris Garrett in Blogging
Its nice to see an innovative idea gaining some interest, albeit slightly late. I’d read John Chow’s post on the same yesterday - like I mentioned in the comments there, Sketchcasting has been around for sometime; honestly, I ran into it over a month or two earlier.
I guess I can associate to your problem with speaking while sketching - the idea didn’t exactly gel with me either, but its certainly worth appreciating.
In fact, if I remember right, there are blogs that use this technique *alone* to teach concepts. They say it achieves what conventional classrooms could do.
But honestly, I don’t know how different it is of taking a video of yourself while doing the same thing on a whiteboard!
I think the idea of sketchcasting is totally cool. I’d like to try it sometime if I happen upon the right topic. Nice job with your first one, although for a minute I thought you were drawing a guy giving someone the finger!
Sketchcasting can be useful. It can be fun too. I just stumbled across it yesterday.
Chris your sketchcast is…ummm…entertaining. I hadn’t really thought before that it might be difficult to talk and draw at the same time, but I can see where it could trip you up.
I’ve been impressed with skecthcasting in general and have liked most of the ones I’ve seen. It’s a great idea. I’ve yet to try one myself, but looking forward to one day giving it a shot.
By the way I’ve been watching Darren’s videos too and one thought that occurred to me last week is that Darren has to be the most genuine person in the industry.
I had less problem with sketching using the graphics pad, but I think that’s because I often use the pad to navigate, rather than the track pad on my laptop.
I think I’ll be using this a lot because I blog about
beadwork, and it is often important to show the order
the beads are added to the project
Joann
@Karthik - Yeah I have seen it done before. I think I will try it in future but using a paint package and screen recorder. My machine didn’t like the interface very much. In the real world drawing and talking seemed natural but thinking about it I am not sure if it was the fact I was recording that put me off - I am still not used to recording my voice and it locks me up somewhat
@Randa - Heh, my drawing ability is usually marginally better than that
@Vyoma - Nice yoda
@Steven - He’s a real nice bloke, a complete diamond. Better not say too much though as we don’t want him to get big headed
I was blown away by this. It just needs the right content to go with it. Traditional blog posts or even podcasts won’t do. You need to think like a teacher in front of a class. How about sketchcasting on improving the transfer of communication through both audio and visual stimuli, and the immediacy and intimacy of a sketch rather than a screencast. This matches the informality of blogging.
Good, intriguing stuff.
This is a very cool stuff and it will profit the communication levels on the web. Interesting development i will be looking at it in more detail thanks to your post.
Ive never heard of sketchcasting before, thanks for the info. Will behecking out your other posts.