The person reading on a corporate shoot is rarely an actor. It’s the CEO recording the year-end message, or the engineer explaining a product they built themselves.
Nobody in the room knows the subject better, and still, the moment the text starts rolling, they sound like someone reading the terms and conditions out loud. The voice goes flat and the eyes slide from side to side. Every take ends with “sorry, can I go again?”
Most of that gets fixed before anyone sits down in front of the camera. Part of it is the presenter’s job, and a bigger part belongs to whoever is running the shoot.
In short
- Write the script for speech, strip out everything that isn’t spoken and have the presenter read it aloud before the day.
- Put the screen as close to the lens as you can, with big text and the reading line at a fixed height.
- For anyone who isn’t a professional presenter, have an operator follow their pace instead of using auto scroll.
- After a slip, restart the sentence instead of the block, and let one person give the notes.
Write the script for speech, then rehearse it
A script that reads well on paper can trip people up out loud. Long sentences with a clause in the middle and words nobody uses in conversation slow the reader down at the worst possible moment.
Keep one idea per sentence, in the words the presenter would use if you asked them the same question over coffee. Write numbers the way they’ll be spoken (“two point four million” instead of “2.4M”), add a pronunciation note for any name that could be read two ways, and break paragraphs where the speaker should breathe.
Then take out everything that isn’t spoken. Lower thirds, camera directions, scene headings and the speaker’s name before each line belong in the script, but on the prompter they’re clutter, and a nervous presenter will read some of it aloud.
If you’re starting from a blank page, our video script template is a good place to begin.
Send the final script a few days ahead and ask the presenter to read it aloud twice, because reading silently skips the hard parts. If a phrase doesn’t sound like them, let them change it, and clear the change with whoever approved the script when it touches a figure or a promise.
On the day, do one full read on the prompter before you roll. That’s when you find out the text is too small from where they sit, or that the third paragraph is a tongue twister nobody noticed.
Set up the screen so the eyes stay still
The camera picks up eye movement very clearly, so the whole setup is about making the presenter’s eyes travel as little as possible.
With a beam splitter rig, the screen lies under a sheet of angled glass in front of the lens, and the presenter reads the reflection while looking straight down the barrel. The glass flips the image, so the screen feeding it has to show mirrored text.
A tablet or monitor the presenter reads directly should not be mirrored, and it’s easy to get this backwards when you’re setting up in a hurry.
Without a rig, put the screen as close to the lens as you can, at lens height. Moving the screen further from the presenter makes the eye movement smaller on camera, but then the text has to grow.
Then size the text. Big letters and short lines, with wide side margins, stop the eyes from sweeping across the screen on every line. Bold sans serif, light on a dark background, suits most people.
The line being read should stay at the same height, close to the lens, so the gaze doesn’t drift down with the scroll.
Who controls the speed
For anyone who isn’t a professional presenter, an operator is worth it.
There are two ways to run the scroll. An operator follows the speaker and speeds up, slows down or stops with them, or the text rolls by itself at a fixed speed, sometimes with a remote or a foot pedal for the presenter.
With auto scroll the speaker chases the text, and that chase is where the rushed reading voice comes from. With an operator the text waits through the pause.
If auto scroll is all you have, set the speed during the rehearsal at the presenter’s pace, not yours, and keep a hand near the pause key.
The operator’s job is to keep the line being spoken on the reading line, with the next two or three lines visible below it. Scroll too fast and the presenter speeds up to keep up. Scroll too slowly and they run out of words mid-sentence.
For the presenter: read ahead and use the punctuation
Your eyes should be a few words ahead of your mouth. That small lead is what lets you say a sentence instead of reading it word by word. It takes a couple of takes to get used to.
Treat punctuation as stage directions. A comma is a short breath and a period is a real pause.
Speak a little slower than feels natural, because nerves speed everyone up. Picture one person behind the lens and talk to them.
Before the first word and after the last, hold still and keep your eyes on the lens for a second, so the editor has a clean way in and out.
When the presenter stumbles
The worst thing to do after a slip is to stop and start the whole block again. Going back to the top every time wears people out, and by the eighth take the opening lines have been said so often they sound recited.
Pause, breathe, and say the sentence again from its beginning. The editor will cut at the pause, and the operator rolls the text back to the start of that sentence.
If the same sentence fails three times, the sentence is probably the problem. Rewrite it on the spot in words the presenter finds easier, and check with the client if the meaning changes.
Giving notes without stopping the take
Agree on one person who talks to the presenter. When the director and the client both give notes at the same time, the presenter tries to apply all of them and the next take comes out worse.
Small things don’t need a cut. Let them finish the block, write down the sentence that needs another pass and ask for a pickup of just that part.
Between takes, give one note at a time and say what to do. “A bit slower in the second paragraph” works better than “you’re rushing”.
For notes during a take, agree on hand signals beforehand or use the prompter itself. If your prompter can show a short message on the presenter’s screen, it’s the best place for “slower” or “eyes up”, since they’re already looking there.
A block on the prompter takes several times its final length to record, and your shoot schedule should account for it.
How this works in RecReview
In RecReview the teleprompter opens from the shoot plan. In each video block, one click brings in the task’s latest script (or you type the text yourself), and AI removes what isn’t spoken: on-screen text, camera directions, scene headings, sound effects and speaker names.
You can edit the text during the shoot or go back to the original script, and the change reaches every screen.
Screens join by scanning a QR code or opening a link, with no login. Only the person running the prompter signs in.
A session takes up to 10 screens, and each one can be renamed, mirrored or disconnected on its own. A screen remembers whether it’s mirrored for the next shoot.
From a laptop, whoever runs the prompter plays and pauses with the space bar, changes the speed with the arrow keys and rolls the text back with the trackpad or by dragging it. Font size, margin, bold and alignment are set from the same place. An arrow on the edge of the presenter’s screen marks the reading line.
On a video block, the timer loads the block’s estimated length and starts when the text starts rolling. A countdown turns amber in the last minute and red in the last 30 seconds.
For a note mid-take, the operator types up to 120 characters and the message appears on the presenter’s screen.
Next to the text, the operator can also watch up to four sources, such as cameras connected to the laptop or a shared window, with a level meter for sources that carry audio. The teleprompter page has the rest.
