.tv Advocate, Amy Mac
Many people think that they need to be a massive production house in order to use or even afford a teleprompter. Not true. If you are putting out webisodes every week, EVEN if you’re just getting started, a teleprompter is not just a luxury… it’s a must. A teleprompter is the difference between memorizing hundreds of lines and hours of shooting and stuttering OR taking 2 minutes to shoot your video and moving on with the rest of your day. The teleprompter we use was around $1000 dollars and is considered by most standards to be pretty small. The farther away you are from the camera the bigger teleprompter you need, at about 10 feet away from our camera, I can read it just fine. That being said you don’t need a $1000 teleprompter or even a $100 teleprompter to get started.
If you plan on being close to your camera (like using your webcam) you can write out the words in a big font on your screen and refer back to it as needed. Alternately, if you have an iphone, or other smart phone, there are teleprompter programs for just a couple dollars in the app store. Just place the phone as close as you can to your camera and you’re off!
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If you do decide to pick up the real deal, there are a couple things to know in order to look like a pro….
Make sure you stand far enough away from the teleprompter that people watching can’t see your eyes reading. Another way to say this is use a bigger font. If you are close enough to the teleprompter that you can have several sentences on it at one time YOU’RE TOO CLOSE. You see this a lot when the president speaks in the Oval office. The camera is so close to him that if you watch his eyes, you can actually see him reading the speech. The way you fix this is to make the text a little bigger and take a couple steps back. This way it seems as though you are just talking and not reading a script!
This brings up my last point on teleprompters. Just because the words are on the screen doesn’t mean you can’t rehearse the text a couple times. I can’t tell you how many times I see terrible commercials on tv or videos online where the person is talking, but clearly someone else wrote the script and they are just reading it. You have to say the lines a couple times to make sure you are getting the inflections right and the script makes sense. It’s like the classic scene from Anchorman when Will Ferrell reads the line on the teleprompter wrong because someone put a question mark at the end of a sentence.
A little knowledge and a small amount of cash can make your next production faster and less stressful by just using a teleprompter.
Thanks Amy for a great post. Do you use a teleprompter when shooting web video? We’d love to hear what topics you’re using – send us a tweet or comment here, on our Facebook page or YouTube channel.
* Disclosure: Amy is a compensated member of the .tv Advocate Program, http://cmp.ly/3/7Zcya9