Re: Camera and teleprompter positioning

Bill has it exactly right about height and the prompter mirror.

You can often rent prompters in larger towns.

If you can't rent and can't buy one, you CAN make your own from scratch; it will be more limited, but will function to get the eyeline right into the lens.

Get a cube-proportioned cardboard box. It is important that it be a cube. Spray paint the inside flat black. Flip the box upside-down onto an LCD panel or a laptop or tablet laying flat facing up, running your software. there are freeware and shareware prompting apps on the web.

You cut a lens port in the center of the back of the box, and cut a square hole in the front of the box, the side facing the talent, but not all the way out to the edges; leave a one-inch frame around the edges.


Get a piece of clean glass that is a rectangle, long side should be the same length as your cardboard box from diagonal rear/bottom to diagonal front/top. Short side is wahtever the width of the cube is, or just a hair less. Put the glass in that box and the opposing corners will hold it at a natural 45-degree angle, if the box was a cube. That's why the box has to be a cube.

This whole mess sits on a folding card table or similar, and you set up the tripod and camera behind it, looking thru the port. Get the lens as close to the back of the glass, without touching it, as possible. Even without actual beam-splitting mirrors, the plain glass can do a good job, if you turn up the brightness of the screen source. Self-adhesive silvered mylar window film would make it much better.