SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Summary
Tom Antion discusses the pros, cons, and best practices for using teleprompters in video production.
• Why use them: Teleprompters save time, keep you on script, and ensure you don’t miss important details (especially in fields like law).
• Common mistakes: Beginners often look stiff (“deer in the headlights”), or appear untrustworthy with “beady eyes” from reading off-screen.
• Eye contact is crucial: Always look directly into the lens through the teleprompter glass to maintain credibility.
Key Points
• History: Early days required expensive studio teleprompters or makeshift solutions (e.g., assistants holding scripts). Modern iPad/tablet setups make them affordable.
• Best practices:
o Use proper hardware with glass reflectors for direct eye contact.
o If using a phone or tablet app, move farther from the camera so the text-to-lens angle is less noticeable.
o Gesture, smile, and move naturally to avoid stiffness.
o Practice regularly.
• AI tools: Some software can “fake” eye contact by adjusting your gaze digitally, but results can look unnatural.
• Alternatives:
o Jump cuts: Record one or two sentences at a time and edit them together. Common today, though once frowned upon.
o Printed scripts: Keep it simple by reading short chunks without tech.
Takeaway
Teleprompters are powerful if used correctly. The goal is to appear natural, maintain eye contact, and avoid looking robotic or untrustworthy. Practice and the right setup are essential to making videos professional and credible.

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Episode1035 - Teleprompters
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 1035 of Screw The Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about teleprompters. Teleprompters can save you enormous amounts of time, but they can also make you look really stupid and untrustworthy. So I'm going to give you the ins and outs of teleprompters today. Hope you didn't miss episode 1034. That was other video gadgets to make your video life way better. And so you can do all kinds of great stuff with a minimal amount of equipment. Make sure you pick up a copy of my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Get version 3.0 because it's the newest version. If you have 2.0, go ahead and grab 3.0 at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org. The only licensed, dedicated internet and digital marketing school in the country, probably the world, and it's certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning.

[00:01:39] Okay. I have lots of training with teleprompters. I go way back to, oh, it's been close to 30 years now. When I was in the actor's union up in DC and we had regular meetings and we practiced like crazy with teleprompters. Things like that.

[00:02:00] So whenever you use a teleprompter, what I see people trying to do, they look like totally deer in the headlights. Or they use a teleprompter incorrectly and they look like beady eyed and sneaky and untrustworthy. So that's what I'm going to teach you how to practice to get out of that. Now, in the old days here at the at the retreat center in my studio, my TV studio, before we had teleprompter software and iPads and things like that, that would do teleprompters we had. I can vividly remember Colin, who used to work here holding up like 22 pages of script underneath the camera as I sat back and and did my whatever I was doing right. And by the time I'd get done, the papers are shaking around like crazy. His arms are getting tired because he has to hide them from the lens of the camera. But they have to be up high enough. Close. So I'm looking right into the lens. And that's what we're going to talk about today, is eye control a little bit because that's really important. So the big breakthrough came when iPads and tablets had teleprompter software and they had camera mounts to hold them. See here's the thing with teleprompters. You are supposed to look through a piece of glass where the text is projected so that you are looking directly. Do not pass go. Do not look a little bit off directly into the camera lens. That way you're talking to the audience like one on one almost because they see your eyes, you make eye contact, you're more believable, more credible and so forth.

[00:03:57] But, uh, that didn't exist until these these programs came around. I mean, you could get a teleprompter, like a TV studio grade for three, 4 or 5, $10,000, right? So nobody like me or us were doing those kinds of things until you got teleprompter software. So this thing that mounts on our camera holds either an iPhone or an iPad that has teleprompter software on it. And the software, you can make it turn upside down and backwards so that when it hits this mirror, it reflects up onto a piece of glass. And then I can look right through to the camera lens and do my script, and I can you can vary the how fast the script moves, you can pause it and things like that. So that's what you want. You want to be looking directly into the lens. If you don't, it looks really bad, I mean. Well, the first thing that looks bad is deer in the headlights. So even if you have good teleprompter and the mechanics of it and the equipment and everything, if you're just staring into it, you look like the, the, the proverbial deer in the headlights. So you don't want to do that. You want to be gesturing, smiling, looking away. Your head's moving. You can gesture things like that. And you look normal. You look relaxed, not deer in the headlights.

[00:05:29] So that takes practice, though to do that, it does save you a lot of time because you don't mess up your script and you don't forget things that you wanted to include. So that's why you do have to practice with this. Now, there are ways that you can use the teleprompter prompter software, and there's tons of it out there for iPads, iPhones, androids. But here's the problem. The text. They try to get it as close to the edge of your your cell phone. If you're using a cell phone as possible so that your eyes can look in the camera, but it's not, it's never going to be good enough. It's never going to be good enough, because you have to look away to read, and it's just a few degrees. Now see if you're looking way off like 45 degrees and you're editing and you know that kind of stuff, then you can get away with it. But you wouldn't put the teleprompter way off to the side and then never look at the camera because again, you look aloof and untrustworthy and so forth. So. So you need to look into the camera at least part of the time. But these cell phone programs can't get it to the actual lens, which is on the edge of the camera of the the cell phone. So what do you do? Well, there's a couple of things you can do. Some are very modern, but all you have to do is move back, get further away so that the further away you get, the smaller that angle becomes between you and your text and the camera lens, or the web cam or whatever you're using.

[00:07:24] So if you're far away, you just make the text really big. And a lot of times you can use a little handheld device to to speed the scroll up, slow it down, or even pause it. If you think of something else that you want to ad lib, say that's what you got to do. See if you're too close to it. That's when you look beady eyed and see the angle between the text and the camera gets way bigger. And it's very obvious to somebody looking at the video that you're not talking to them. You're reading off a script. You look like you're trying to trick them. You look beady eyed, you look untrustworthy. I mean, it's just terrible. And I got this drilled into me, as you know, being in the actor's union for all these years. So that's the first thing, is to get far away. And then that takes care of it. But there is the newfangled things that people are doing. There's programs like descript captions, I think veed io that they will use. You can look off and read your script, but it uses AI to move your eyes as if they're looking at the camera. I mean, it's just when I first saw this, I'm thinking, this is crazy.

[00:08:39] After all the years I'd had to mess around and practice and and do this. Now. They do it with AI. All right. But still, that doesn't get you out of. And it may even be detrimental if you look natural by moving and moving your head around. It may mess up the software. And then you look like, I don't know, like you're wearing those googly eye glasses, you know, with with the springs on them. I don't know how bad that would look. So I would practice, get far from the camera, or get some of the mechanical things that you can actually put your iPad or your iPhone or Android with the software and team it up with the mechanics, with a nice mirror and, and, uh, glass system. So you're looking right into the camera when you're doing your script. That's, uh, I just don't trust the AI. If you're doing a really good job of being natural, to be able to grab your eyes and move them to the camera without looking totally crazy, maybe they can. Maybe they will be able to do it great in the future. But it's probably good for you to get this skill now. There's the mechanical devices. You can just look like iPad. You can you can go on Amazon and look for iPad, teleprompter, things like that. But there's another one that we got where you can put it on the screen of a laptop or a desktop and it acts.

[00:10:11] It's a teleprompter. It's taken the text off of your screen. And you know that you have used software to reverse and backwards and so forth. So it goes into a mirror, and then you can look right into your webcam, right on the edge of your laptop or your desktop. And perfect, you can be as close as you want because you're looking directly into the lens. See, that's the whole thing about this distance thing. If you if you're close and you're looking off to the side. You look terrible. You can be close as you want if you're looking directly into the webcam. See? So that's the devices you can get. And there's one other method that's come into vogue called a jump cut. And this isn't nearly as smooth as what I'm talking about, but it's very common now. See, jump cuts are where you see the scene is cut and then the person's talking again, but their head might move just a fraction. And it's, and it's, it's taken out all the space in between what they're saying. And in the old days, as I came up through the ranks in the video world, that was taboo. If you saw jump cuts in a video, that was the worst video on Earth, and the editor was an idiot and and you look terrible, but now it's very common. So one way you can get away from a teleprompter if you need to get certain things done is you just print out everything that you're supposed to say and then do it one sentence or two sentences at a time and let the editor cut out the the text in between.

[00:11:53] Now there is a little bit of skill to it, so you don't want to be moving your head too far, or you can show up in a different location sometimes, and that's obvious that you did it on purpose. But if you're doing one whole script, one piece at a time, you don't want to be all over the place. It'll just look. It'll just look stupid. So there is some skill involved in doing jump cut videos to get rid of teleprompters, but you don't have to memorize anything but one sentence at a time. And then you look at your script, try to get back pretty close to where you were, deliver the next line, look back at your script, figure it out, deliver that line, try to be fairly close to where you're supposed to be, and then so forth, and then you can get the whole script done just by printing out what you want to say. No software involved, no equipment involved. Just your camera and you. So there's a whole bunch of ways you can you can really up your video game. Now, there's times when I had to do exact words. Sometimes, especially if you're in a legal field, you don't want to miss anything or miss or misspeak or use the wrong term, you know.

[00:13:08] So you want to have a written out script in the long run. It can if you're if you're not real comfortable in front of the camera, you need to practice. But this can save you a lot of time from missteps and messing up and speaking wrong. You just don't want to look like deer in the headlights, so don't do it unless you're willing to practice and loosen yourself up. I'll even be willing to to. If you send me your video, I'll critique it for you, of you doing a little bit on teleprompter because it's so important for you to look credible and not beady eyed and so forth. So. So I suggest you listen to this again and decide which method you want to try. Your video game will will go up and you'll get a lot more work done. Once you get this skill under your belt, you'll get a lot more video out there with what you want to say. All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Make sure you check out my school and my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com. If you're in the mentor program, you get a scholarship to the school that you can gift to somebody, which will save you probably a couple hundred thousand dollars of sending them to a four year indoctrination camp, which they call colleges nowadays. So check it out. All right. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.