Reading from a teleprompter and want to avoid looking super awkward on camera? It's true. When you read a script, you can look and sound like a robot.
It is embarrassing and uncomfortable for both you and the viewers. But I promise you, you can look natural while reading a script from a teleprompter. Here are seven tips to achieve it that I learned from 18 years of reading scripts for my own YouTube videos and working with professional teleprompter operators.
Yeah, that job actually exists while working on multimillion dollar productions for companies like Panasonic, Monster Cable, Samsung and lots more. And you won't find some of these tips anywhere else on YouTube, especially tip number four. Let's go!
Before you ever get the words on the prompter, success at reading them begins when you're actually writing the script. And here's a pro tip. I recommend trying not to script, especially at first. It takes skill and practice to get good at prompting a script. So bullet points can actually be a great way to make it feel more natural right off the bat.
But for this video, I'm going to focus on actual scripts because I know you want to do it anyway. When you're writing a script, throw out everything you learned from English class and forget all grammar lessons known to man. Do not write in proper grammar language.
Write like you speak. Do not becomes don't. Start sentences with and.
Go ahead, break the rules. Avoid big words and use words that you use in everyday language as you're hanging out with your best friends over dinner. Structure your script to avoid screw-ups. To do this, you're going to add a lot more paragraph breaks than you naturally would. One to two sentences per paragraph.
No more. It helps you to take more breaths, which feels more natural, and gives you a space for cutting when you do inevitably mess up and need to pick back up as you're recording. Now, the worst thing you can do when reading from a teleprompter is let the viewer see your eyes moving as you read the script. It breaks all concentration of the viewer paying attention to the content and value, and instead all they see and think about is your eyes. Trust gets broken.
A good rule of thumb is to stand five feet away from the prompter. You may not have that kind of space in your setup, so then keep in mind that there is a beautiful magic balance of the distance you are from the prompter and the size of the text on the prompter. You can achieve a shorter distance with the right text size on screen. And tips number five, six, and seven will help you achieve that. Practice before recording.
So when I hosted my very first multi-million dollar production, I was new to reading from a real professional prompter with 30 people in the room watching me and a director shouting, cut, the whole big ordeal. You know, I learned a very incredibly valuable lesson during that. Your mouth moves differently.
and your brain functions differently when you read from a computer screen versus a teleprompter screen. So before recording, I want you to practice on the prompter and get your brain and your mouth used to the script in this environment. The teleprompter operator on that production, it was her whole entire job which blew my mind, showed me that I read naturally except when certain things were true on the prompter. Words like to or or. or of consistently tripped me up when those two-letter words were at the end of a line.
So she went through the script, dropped every two-letter word from the end of a line to the beginning of the next line, and guess what? No more screw ups. You are going to have certain things, maybe not the same things as me, that will trip your brain up. So practice, listen and pay attention to where you mess up, then adjust accordingly. Do you want to get even more training on reading from a prompter?
In addition to all of these tips in this video, things like how to set up your teleprompter software for the best results, which physical controls you should use, to even more nitty gritty deeper dive training on scripting and reading. Well, I've got so many requests for this. I decided to let all of my knowledge and passion on this topic let loose in a full training that's coming up live very soon.
Check the link in the description to get registered. Most people get a really strange look of concentration when reading from a prompter. You're trying so hard to read it that your eyes kind of squint and your face gets all scrunchy and your body becomes stiff.
I want you to relax your body. use your hands move your shoulders start to pay attention in real life how you move your body when you're just having a conversation in the checkout line at the grocery store or with your friends mimic those movements while you're in front of the teleprompter it's gonna feel awkward at first and it will become more natural the more you do it in addition to relaxing your body, I also want you to relax your eyes. It is natural to look away from the camera and the script. If you were to have an in-person conversation with someone and you stared them in the face the entire conversation, it would really start to feel awkward and that person would...
ah see I can't even do it I looked away... but that person would start to get really creeped out if you were just staring them in the eye at all times. So look away in the natural spots as you would in person. and move your freaking head. This is really weird.
If you never move your head and never move your eyes, even if you're moving your eyes, it would look something like this. And that's very, very strange. And it's what causes the awkwardness.
But this is natural where my head is moving along with my eyes and my hands and my body, right? And it means that if I were doing any other video where I'm not calling attention to the fact that I'm reading a script, you wouldn't even know. And don't forget about your voice. And so.
Monotone reading will kill your attention. People don't want to listen to a flat voice for 10 or 15 minutes. Unless that is truly your normal personality in everyday life, make sure that you use inflection and emphasis in your voice. You can actually help yourself do this with the scripting process itself.
Use ellipses, dot, dot, dot, to give yourself visual cues to trail a sentence off. Use all caps to remind yourself to raise your voice to get a get excited or angry. Add emotion into the script itself to help bring that out in the reading of your script. I'm going way deeper on this topic of scripting and reading naturally from a teleprompter in an upcoming live training session.
So you can get registered at livestreamingpros.com slash prompter, link in the description. And if you want the best prompter to use, check out this playlist on the Elgato prompter, how to set it up and get the most out of it. I'll see you there.