Teleprompter for iPhone, no app to install

Where the phone goes

The phone has to end up beside the lens, at roughly the height of your own eyes. Held in your hand it sits low, and reading from your hand points your eyes at your chest for the whole take. That downward look is the thing a prompter exists to remove, so a phone held in your lap removes the reason to use one.

A second tripod with a phone clamp is the tidy answer. A stack of books next to the camera is the answer most takes actually get, and nobody watching the finished video can tell which one you used. What matters is the angle your eyes travel between the lens and the first word of a line. Keep that small and you stop looking like someone reading.

One arrangement does not work at all: filming on the phone's front camera while the script runs on the same screen. The camera app is in front. Use a second device for the script, or shoot on a camera and keep the phone for reading.

Landscape or portrait

Landscape gives a wide, short stage: long lines, and only a few of them in view. Portrait gives a narrow column, more lines at once, and a phone that stands taller next to the camera.

Neither is wrong, but line length decides which one reads well. A line that runs the full width of a phone in landscape makes your eyes cross the screen and come back, and that traverse shows up on camera as a flick. Raise the text size until lines break after seven or eight words and most of the flick goes away. On a phone the size control is mostly a line length control.

The address bar does not move the reading line

The stage is a fixed share of the screen, measured against the height the page has while the browser's own bars are showing. The reading line lies across the middle of it and the controls sit along its bottom edge, so neither of them shifts when the address bar slides away and comes back.

The controls are docked to the stage rather than to the page, which is why you can change speed mid-take without scrolling anything.

Text size against the distance you will stand at

Text size runs from 24 to 96 and starts at 44, which suits a phone at about arm's length. Set it by reading rather than by the number: put the phone where it will be during the take, stand where you will be standing, press Play, and read a paragraph out loud. Then move the slider two or three steps and read it again.

The workable range on a phone is narrower than it looks. Too large and you get three words a line, the roll turns into a flicker, and you lose any sense of what is coming. Too small and you squint, which the camera picks up even when the words are technically legible.

Starting a take with one thumb

Play starts a three second countdown and then the roll. Pressing Play again during the countdown cancels it, which is the button you want when someone walks into the room on two. The countdown itself can be switched off in the dock once you are on take nine and tired of waiting for it.

Recue sends the script back to the top and stops it. After a fluffed line that is one tap, rather than dragging the text back with a fingertip and guessing where the top is.

There is also a switch for the band across the reading line. On a laptop it is a helpful marker. On a short landscape stage it takes a real share of the height, and some people read better without it.

Space, M and F are keyboard shortcuts, so they only come up if you have a keyboard attached. Everything they do has a button in the dock.

Getting your own script onto the phone

Writing a script by thumb is miserable, so most people write it somewhere else and move it over. Mail it to yourself, or put it in a note that syncs. We do not sync it for you: your script lives in the browser on the device you typed it into, and that is the same decision as not uploading it.

To paste on a phone, tap into the script box and use the paste menu. Inside the box, paste behaves like any text field, so it drops the text at the caret rather than replacing what is there. Select all first if you mean to replace the whole script.

Whatever you end up with is written to this browser's storage as you type. It survives closing the tab, but not clearing your browsing data, so keep the original somewhere if the script matters.

Mirror, and when you actually want it

The mirror control flips the script left to right. Only the script flips, so the dock stays the right way round and the controls are still readable when the words are backwards.

There is one occasion to turn it on: the phone is lying face up under a beam splitter and you are reading its reflection in the glass. There are small splitter rigs built around a phone, and they put the text right on the lens axis, which is as good as the eyeline gets. Setup is on the mirror mode page. If nothing is reflecting the screen, leave mirror off.

When the take gets interrupted

A call, a lock screen, or a switch to another app in the middle of a take is normal, and the script comes back: it is in the browser's storage, so it is there when you return to the tab.

The position in the script is not stored. If the tab reloads you start at the top, which is what recue does anyway. Before a long take, it is worth turning on Do Not Disturb and giving the screen an auto lock long enough to cover the whole script, because a screen that sleeps at the two minute mark ends the take for you.

Voice follow on an iPhone

Voice follow listens while you read and moves the script to match, and where the audio goes depends on the browser. Browsers that can run speech recognition on the device keep the audio there. Safari and iOS cannot today, so they hand the audio to the browser vendor for transcription under that vendor's terms. The switch in the dock says which path you are on before you turn anything on, and either way we do not receive or store your audio. The detail is on the voice follow page.

Reading well off a small screen

A phone shows fewer lines than any other screen you might use, so you get less warning of what is coming. That changes how the script should be written rather than how it should be read.

• Keep paragraphs to two or three sentences. On a phone a long paragraph arrives as a wall and leaves nowhere to land.
• Break where you breathe. A blank line is a place to look up.
• Put the sentence you cannot get wrong at the start of a paragraph, where you will see it coming.
• Read the whole thing once at the speed you have set before you record anything.

The iPad page covers the same job on a bigger screen, and the YouTube page covers structuring the recording itself. The prompter is on the home page.