A small prompter, right under your camera.

Why small beats big at a desk

The usual advice for eye contact is distance: sit further back and the gap between the lens and the text shrinks to an angle nobody can see. I wrote about that in stop losing eye contact while reading a script. But a desk does not let you back away. On a call, a walkthrough or a quick daily video, you sit where the keyboard is.

At that distance, every centimetre between the lens and the words shows. A full-screen prompter puts most of its text far from the camera, and your eyes travel down the screen as you read. A small box right under the lens keeps every word you read within a short glance of it. The viewer sees you looking at them, with a slight, steady downward tilt that reads as thinking rather than reading.

How much text a small box needs

Less than it feels like. When you read aloud, your eyes are only ever a few words ahead of your voice. What you need in view is the line you are on and the start of the next one. Two or three short lines is enough. Five is a comfortable ceiling.

Short lines matter more than many lines. A wide box forces your eyes to sweep left and right, and that sweep is the movement that gives reading away. Keep the box narrow, a phrase per line, and let the text come to you rather than chasing it across.

Text size is the trade-off. Bigger text reads with less effort but fits fewer lines in the same box. Start bigger than you think, shrink it until you can fit two or three lines, and stop there.

The first line belongs at the lens

In a small box, the line you are reading should sit at the top, nearest the camera, with what comes next below it. That way the words your eyes are on are always the closest ones to the lens. It also means the very first line of the script has to start inside the box, fully visible, not half above its top edge. A take that starts by squinting at a cut-off line starts badly.

Nothing on top of the text

A small box has no room to spare. Any button, badge or label that sits on the text hides exactly the words you need, and in a box of three lines, one hidden word is a lost sentence. Controls belong outside the text, or out of sight while you read. Margins help too: a little space on each side keeps the words clear of the edges and of anything drawn near them.

The end of the line is where it fails

On a full screen, a scroll that runs slightly ahead of you is harmless: the words you have not read are still on screen, just higher up. In a small box, there is no higher up. If the text moves on before you have said the last word or two of a line, those words leave the box and you are left to remember them.

That is why a scroll on a timer is hard to live with in a small box, and why the scroll should follow your voice instead. With the text moving only as you say the words, the line stays until you have finished it. Write for it too: end each line on a word you will actually say, and keep the last words of a line simple, so a stumble there does not cost you the sentence. More on that in how to format a script for a teleprompter.

Setting it up in Mirrento

Mirrento gives you two ways to get a small box under the camera.

The overlay. It floats the script over your other windows and lets clicks go through it. On a MacBook, the Notch layout puts a small dock right under the camera. The Top, Bottom and Corner layouts, or a drag in Edit layout, put it anywhere else, at any size. In Settings, Display, Overlay text size sets how many lines fit, down to 10, and in the Notch layout the dock grows or shrinks to keep two lines. Overlay text position moves where the first line starts inside the box, and Overlay font and Overlay colors let you pick a serif or sans and dark text on a light background if that reads better for you. I wrote more about the overlay in reading your script over the app you are demoing.

The prompter window. With no second screen, the prompter can open in a window on your Mac. Hold Command and drag it to move it under the camera, and hold Command and drag a corner to make it small; a tip at the bottom of the window reminds you until you dismiss it. In Settings, Display, Eye line moves the reading line up or down inside it, and Margin left and Margin right narrow the column. While the prompter is reading, whether the script plays or follows your voice, the buttons along the top fade out two seconds after you last move the mouse.

Either way, turn on Voice follow, so the text waits for your words rather than a clock. If walking away from a big screen is not an option at your desk, the 7-day trial is enough to set up a small box under the camera and record one video from it.