Using a teleprompter for TikTok and Shorts

Vertical short video punishes a script that sounds written

A prompter helps in any format. In short vertical video it helps more, and it gives you away faster, for three reasons that all come from the shape of the thing.

The frame is close. A vertical shot of a person is mostly face, so your eyes are a much larger part of the picture than they are in a wide 16:9 shot. An eye line that would pass unnoticed in a talking-head interview is obvious here.

The format is a conversation. Someone speaking to camera in a feed is performing the same act as someone speaking to you across a table, and a listener detects "this is being read to me" in about two seconds.

And there is no room to recover. Thirty seconds does not contain a slow start, a stumble and a comeback. Whatever goes wrong in the first line is the whole video.

The thing most likely to go wrong is therefore the script rather than the rig: sentences written the way things get written, with clauses, qualifications and a warm-up, read at a steady rate into a format with room for none of them.

Where the script goes when the phone is the camera

If you film on a phone, you cannot read from that phone. The camera app owns the screen. That leaves three arrangements, and they differ mostly in how big an angle you accept between the script and the lens.

The common answer is a second device beside the lens: a laptop, tablet or second phone running the prompter, parked as close to the filming phone's camera as it will go. The angle is what matters, not the distance. Divide the offset by how far you are standing from the phone and multiply by 57 to get degrees. Under about 5 degrees nobody registers it. A second phone 5 cm from the lens, read from 60 cm, is about 5 degrees. A laptop 15 cm to the side at the same distance is about 14, which in a close-up is unmistakable.

An offset to the side is the one people notice first, because it looks like there is somebody else in the room. If you have to accept an angle, accept it above the lens rather than next to it.

The cheapest way to shrink the angle is to back off and crop in. The same physical offset subtends a smaller angle from further away, so standing at 1.5 m instead of 60 cm turns that 14 degrees into about 6. Most phones have a longer lens or enough resolution to crop, and a vertical short is not a resolution-critical format.

That trade has a cost, and it is audio. A phone's microphone at 1.5 m picks up the room as well as you, and short video is watched with sound on far more often than long video is. If you back off to fix the eye line, put a microphone somewhere the camera cannot see it and record to that instead. A clip-on mic under the neckline of a shirt is enough, and it costs less than the reshoot you will otherwise do when the first batch comes back echoing.

A beam splitter removes the angle altogether: glass in front of the lens, with the script reflected into it. It is a real rig with a hood and a tripod, and it is more than most short-form shoots need, but if you are shooting close-ups and holding the look, it is the only thing that fully solves this. Setting up mirror mode with a beam splitter covers the parts and the lining-up. If you are not using one, leave mirror off: flipped text on a screen you are reading directly is simply backwards.

A narrow reading screen changes the text size problem

Whatever you read from, the text has to be big enough to take in at a glance and the lines short enough that your eyes do not visibly sweep across them.

On a phone-sized reading screen those two fight. At a size you can read from a metre away you get three or four words per line, so the script becomes a fast vertical crawl and your eyes track downward constantly. Two things help. Turn the reading device to landscape, which roughly doubles the words per line at the same size. Or read from the largest screen you have and put the camera further away, which lets you drop the text size without losing legibility.

One layout detail is worth knowing before you set up. The reading line sits in the middle of the viewport, so a full-screen browser window puts the line at the middle of the display. If your reading device is sitting under the camera, a short window along the top edge of the screen puts the line much closer to the lens than fullscreen does.

Keep your head in the top half of the frame while you are at it. The platform's own interface (caption, handle, buttons) covers the bottom and the right-hand edge, and a shot composed without allowing for it puts your chin behind a row of icons.

Speed, and why short video runs faster

Whatever pace you use in a three-minute video, you will use a faster one in a thirty-second video. The format compresses everything, including you.

Do not guess at the difference. Read the actual script out loud at the pace the piece wants, time it, count the words, and set that. Speed on the prompter is in words per minute rather than pixels per second, so the number you land on means the same thing on the phone you tested with and on the laptop you shoot with next week.

A rate set too high is the specific failure mode of short-form: you chase the roll, the delivery flattens, and a flat thirty seconds has nothing else in it to carry the video.

Writing thirty seconds

Duration is arithmetic. At 150 words per minute:

15 seconds is about 38 words
30 seconds is about 75 words
45 seconds is about 113 words
60 seconds is about 150 words

Seventy-five words is four or five sentences. That is the entire budget, and it has to hold a hook, one idea and the thing the viewer leaves with. There is no room for a greeting, a channel introduction, or a sign-off. "Hey guys, welcome back" is six words, eight per cent of a thirty-second video, and it says nothing.

A structure that fits the budget:

The first line states the problem or the claim, in the viewer's terms.
The middle is one specific thing: a number, a step, a before and after.
The last line is what they take away, said once and not explained.

Then stop. Paste it into the stage and read the duration estimate before you record, because a script that runs to forty seconds when you budgeted thirty gets cut somewhere, and cutting it now costs less than cutting it in the edit.

The phrases that give you away

Short-form scripts are usually longer-form scripts with the middle removed, and the giveaways come from that.

"In this video I'm going to show you" is a structural announcement borrowed from a ten-minute format. Say the thing instead.
"Let's dive in", "without further ado" and "stick around to the end" are all transitions into a length you do not have.
"As I mentioned" points at nothing. There is no earlier.
Anything with a subordinate clause holding the sentence open. A listener with a thumb on the screen will not wait for the resolution.

There is a wider version of this problem and a set of fixes for it in writing scripts for the ear. The short version: one idea per sentence, subject at the front, numbers rounded, contractions in.

Captions are worth writing for too. Automatic captions are what a muted viewer reads, and they mangle unusual proper nouns and fast numbers. If the recogniser is likely to get a word wrong, either say it slower or use a different word, because the caption is the copy for anyone watching with sound off.

Batching a session

Short video is made in batches, and a batch is where the small friction adds up.

Keep each script separate rather than pasting over the last one. Several scripts sit side by side on the stage, so five shorts can be five scripts you switch between rather than one box you keep overwriting. Recue puts the current one back to the top after a fluffed take, which is most takes.

The three second countdown is worth keeping on while your reading device is out of reach, because it is the time you need to press play and get back into frame. Turn it off once you are close enough to start and speak, since waiting three seconds forty times is its own kind of tax.

What this does not do

Two limits are worth stating before you plan a shoot around it.

There is no recording. The prompter scrolls your script; your phone or your camera records the video. Some browser teleprompters do record, and this one does not.

There is no phone remote. Play, pause and speed are changed on the device showing the script, which is why the countdown and the reach to your reading device are worth thinking about while you set up rather than during a take.

Everything else (speed, text size, colours, countdown, mirror) is on the dock along the bottom of the stage, and nothing has to be installed or signed up for to use it.