Here it is.
Put your script text as close to the camera lens as you can possibly get it.
That's the trick. Everything else — your pacing, your expression, your breathing — is secondary to this one positioning decision. Get this right and your delivery improves immediately. Get it wrong and nothing else compensates for it.
Why This Works
When viewers watch someone read off-camera, what they're actually seeing is a gaze direction that doesn't point at them. The camera is at one position. The script is at another position. The reader's eyes go back and forth between the two. That angular difference — even a few degrees — reads as "this person is reading" instantly and unconsciously.
Your brain is extremely good at detecting where someone's eyes are pointing. It's a core social cognition skill that develops in infancy. You can't turn it off as a viewer, and you can't hide it as a creator.
The only way to eliminate the gaze offset is to eliminate the physical distance between where you're reading and where the camera is. When the script text is directly in front of the lens, looking at the text is the same as looking at the lens. Your eyes are always in the right place.
How to Do This in Practice
If you're using a phone: hold it in portrait mode at roughly arm's length, camera lens near the top. Position the scrolling text in the upper portion of the screen, as close to the lens as the UI allows. Some teleprompter apps let you set the text position — use that setting. FlowPrompt's camera overlay handles this automatically because the text is rendered directly over the camera preview, with your lens at the top of the frame.
If you're using a separate prompter device next to a camera: get it as close to the lens as possible. Not "near the camera" — as close as the physical setup will allow. Every inch of separation between the text and the lens creates angular offset. Six inches of separation at a 4-foot shooting distance creates a visibly different gaze direction.
If you're using a hardware teleprompter hood: you're already doing this correctly by design. The beamsplitter glass places the text directly in front of the lens. Hardware teleprompters solved this problem decades ago. The challenge is that they're bulky and slow to set up, which is why software camera overlay is increasingly the practical choice for solo creators.
That's genuinely it. Before worrying about pacing, font size, scroll speed, or any other teleprompter variable — get the positioning right. Once the text is at the lens, everything else becomes easier. Want to practice? Join the FlowPrompt beta and try the camera overlay mode.
