A phone makes a perfectly good teleprompter — most people's first rig is exactly that — but the settings that work at desk distance fail completely at two metres, and the setup you choose decides your eye line more than any app does. There are three phone setups worth knowing: the propped phone, the clip-on mirror rig, and the full beam-splitter, and each one is right for a different distance and budget.
This guide walks the ladder from free to serious, then covers the physics of reading at distance, the mirror and rotation settings rigs demand, how to run a take when you can't touch the phone, and whether to record on the same device or a second one.
The three phone setups
Propped next to the lens. The phone leans against something beside your camera — or beside your laptop's webcam — showing the script. Cost: nothing. The compromise is eye line: your eyes are on the script, not the lens, and the closer the camera, the more visible the difference. Workable when the camera is far enough back that the angle between script and lens gets small; at arm's length, the audience can watch you read.
A clip-on mirror rig (roughly £20–£60). A small hood and mirror assembly that clips over your phone or sits on a tripod, reflecting a second device's screen — or splitting one phone between script and camera. The step up is real: the script moves close to or over the lens. The compromises are size (a small mirror means less text on screen at once) and the mirror flip, which your software has to handle.
A full beam-splitter (£30–£100 for phone-sized hoods). Half-mirrored glass at 45 degrees, script reflected directly over the lens, camera shooting through. Eye contact and reading become the same act. This is the setup that makes "reading" invisible, and we've covered the full build in our beam-splitter setup guide. Worth knowing before you buy: the glass passes roughly a third to a half of the light, so everything about text and contrast has to be set more boldly than the bare screen suggests.
The honest ladder advice: start propped, with the camera further back than feels natural. If you find yourself shooting weekly, the £30 hood pays for itself in the first session where nobody can see your eyes flick.
Reading distance: why desk settings fail at two metres
Here's the mistake nearly everyone makes once: you set up the script sitting at the phone, where the default font looks generous, then you step back to your mark and discover you're squinting at a wall of ants.
A phone teleprompter is read at one to three metres, in glances, with your attention mostly on the lens. That changes what "readable" means:
- Font size should be set from your mark, not from the phone. Walk back, read a line, and if there's any lean or squint, go bigger. On a phone at two metres, comfortable usually means only a handful of words per line — which feels absurd at arm's length and is exactly right from your mark.
- Fewer words on screen is a feature. Big text means less visible script, which worries people. But you read a phrase at a time anyway, and a good prompter keeps your place; a screen crammed with small text just gives your eyes more places to get lost.
- Contrast does the work your eyes can't. Light text on a near-black background, and a position highlight bold enough to find in peripheral vision. If your setup involves any glass, assume half the contrast is gone before it reaches you.
- The typeface is allowed to help you. If you find reading aloud under pressure difficult, a face designed for it changes the experience: TellyPrompter ships OpenDyslexic as a first-class script face with the same size range as the default, because for plenty of readers it's simply the difference between a script they can perform from and one they can't. And no cue in the app is carried by colour alone, so losing the colour distinction — as roughly one in twelve men do — never means losing your place.
Mirror mode and rotation
Two settings exist specifically for rigs, and both live in software.
Mirror mode flips the display horizontally so that a reflected script reads correctly. Any mirror or beam-splitter rig needs it. Check it with a real sentence in the glass, not just a glance — and notice that the whole screen flips, controls included, so left on screen is right in the glass.
Rotation matters for phones locked to portrait. Some rigs and mounts want the screen turned 90 degrees, and if the phone's own rotation lock is on — as it often deliberately is during a shoot — the software needs its own rotation control. TellyPrompter has one for exactly this case.
One habit worth building: set mirror and rotation before mounting the phone. Fishing a phone out of a hood to reach a setting gets old on the first shoot day.
Running the take when you can't touch the phone
Once the phone is in a rig at your mark, it's effectively out of reach: your hands are in frame, the screen may be behind glass, and walking over to poke it means re-settling into position for every take.
This is where the scroll mode decides your day. A constant-speed scroll set by guesswork has no mid-take correction available — the phone is untouchable, so a wrong speed means chasing the text or abandoning the take. A voice-following mode removes the problem at source: TellyPrompter listens as you read and keeps a highlight on the word you're saying, through pauses, ad-libs and backtracking, so there's no speed to have set wrongly. Speech recognition runs on the device and the audio is never uploaded.
Voice commands close the remaining gap. "Telly, stop" ends a take from your mark; "Telly, again" starts a retake; "Telly, marker" drops a marker where you stumbled, so you know what to check afterwards without touching anything. The one limitation to know: voice features depend on the browser's speech recognition, which Firefox doesn't implement — there, the sound-level and constant modes still work, and everything else is unaffected.
Same phone, or a second device?
Recording on the prompting phone is the simplest possible rig: one device, script and camera together. TellyPrompter records in-app with the script and camera preview sharing the screen — the split between them is draggable, because how much of yourself you need to see is your call, not the app's. The trade-off is that the phone doing everything is also the phone whose camera position is fixed by where you can read from.
A second device separates the jobs: your best camera shoots, the phone prompts beside or behind it. This is the natural shape for mirror and beam-splitter rigs, and it frees the camera to be a camera — any distance, any lens. The cost is a little more setup and syncing the footage in the edit.
There's no wrong answer; there's a distance answer. At arm's length to a metre and a half, one phone does it all. Beyond that, the propped-phone eye line starts to show, and a second device plus a rig is the upgrade path.
Settings checklist, per setup
Propped phone: camera as far back as the room allows; font size set from your mark; dark background; voice-following on so a pause doesn't cost you your place.
Clip-on mirror rig: all of the above, plus mirror mode on and verified with a real sentence; rotation set if the mount turns the phone; settings finalised before the phone goes in the hood.
Beam-splitter: all of the above, plus contrast set boldly enough to survive the glass losing a third to half the light; a key light brighter on your face than the screen's glow; one full read-aloud from your mark before the first take.
Whatever the rung, the test is the same two minutes: stand where you'll perform, read half the script aloud, and see whether the text kept your place without your hands or your feet moving. When it does, the rig has done its job — the rest is delivery.