Knowledge Bank
3 min read
The teleprompter, and where to put the screen
The eyeline gives it away, not the reading. Where the screen sits decides whether anyone can tell.
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Reading from a script does not have to look like reading from a script. A prompter at a sensible speed keeps your eyes near the lens, kills the "umm, where was I" cuts, and gets a clean take in half the attempts. This one runs in the browser: paste your words, set the pace and the text size, go full screen.
The controls, so you are not hunting mid-take
Space plays and pauses. R resets to the top. Escape exits.
Learn those three before the first take. Reaching for a mouse to pause is the thing that puts your hand in shot and your eyes off the lens, and it happens on almost every first attempt.
Where you put the screen decides whether it reads
Get the screen as close to the lens as the setup allows. A tablet propped directly under the camera is the usual answer, and a phone works at close range. A laptop off to one side is the arrangement that makes prompter takes look like prompter takes, because your eyes have to travel to reach it.
Distance matters as much as position. Further back means smaller eye movement, so if you can put the screen further away and raise the text size to compensate, do that.
Set the speed slower than feels right
The instinct is to match the scroll to how fast you read. That produces a chase, and a chase is audible.
Set it a touch slower than comfortable so you are always waiting slightly rather than catching up. The pause between sentences comes back, and those pauses are most of what makes a delivery sound like a person talking.
If you have no idea what your natural pace is, measure it once with the speed coach and set the prompter to that.
Break the script into short lines
Long paragraphs scroll as a wall and your eyes have to work out where they are on every glance back. Short lines, one thought each, are far easier to catch.
This is worth doing to the script itself before you paste it. A prompter script and a reading script are different documents, and the prompter version wants more line breaks than looks sensible on the page.
What it will not fix
A prompter makes you fluent. It does not make you interesting, and there is a version of this that sounds word-perfect and completely flat.
The usual cure is to know the beat rather than the sentence. Read the line, look at the lens, then say it. That half-second of looking away from the words is where the delivery comes from.
Nothing is uploaded
The script stays on your device and there is nothing to install. It works on anything with a screen, which includes the phone already sitting next to you.
Keep reading
The take itself is covered in shooting the A-roll, and the read-aloud pass belongs to writing the script. If the delivery is the problem rather than the words, being less boring on camera is the one to read.