Aaron Marcus, a veteran actor and commercial model, shares three teleprompter tips: read the script many times before rolling, rehearse with your operator so they can follow your pacing, and ask for phonetic spellings of difficult words. He prefers a human operator over voice-activated scrolling.
Hi, I'm Aaron Marcus, and if you're not familiar with my work, I've been a full-time actor and a commercial model for actually over 30 years. I've booked over 1,200 jobs so far. Perhaps you saw my recurring role on House of Cards, worked on Gotham, Mr. Robot, Halt and Catch Fire, Rectify, hundreds of television commercials, feature films, radio spots, narrations, and commercial modeling jobs. And And what I want to share with you today is talking about being an on-camera narrator. Just this morning, I had a really fun job doing that kind of work. And if you're not familiar with it, basically you are the spokesperson. You're the one who perhaps is setting up a scene for other actors in a training film. You're the person who's talking, giving out information. This one happened to be a— It's a project for investors and I was sharing information. And typically when you are an on-camera narrator, you're gonna be reading off of a teleprompter. Teleprompter is like what all the newscasters use. The words scroll right in front of you, you read them, and sometimes people make the mistake in thinking that it's really easy to do an on-camera narration. It's easy to read a teleprompter. All the words are right there. You don't have to memorize anything. And yet, I mean, all that is true. Certainly it is easier. You don't have to memorize anything because the words are right in front of you. But don't make the mistake of thinking it's simple. You can just walk in. You don't have to look at it. All the words are right in front of you. It does take a lot of preparation. And I can tell you, and what I want to share here is some of the tips and tricks that I use that will be really helpful to you if you ever get an opportunity to be an on-camera narrator or just use a teleprompter. So number one, you've got to read the script over tons, tons of times. Just be really familiar with it and make sure you understand all the words. Make sure you can pronounce all the words. When you do get to the set, talk to the person who is running the teleprompter. See if you can rehearse it once or twice ahead of time because things look very different on a monitor than they do on your script. And the length of each sentence is going to be very different. I don't mean the words, but on the prompter, you might not have the full sentence that you do have on a sheet of paper. If there are any words you're having problems pronouncing, sometimes you can just ask the person running the prompter to write it out phonetically just to make it easier for you. This morning I caught there was a grammatical error. And, you know, I figured I probably would pick it up during my read. But just to make it really easy, let's just correct it. Instead of something— it was future tense instead of past tense. And here's the other key thing. There was a program that the producer was going to be using on the prompter that was voice activated. And I really had some doubts about it. Maybe it does work in some situations. We tested it a couple of times. It just didn't work well. And basically, when you end your sentence, then the, the, the The words will continue to scroll. The hard thing is you want the person running the teleprompter to follow you. And by the way, and that's another really key component here, you know, don't follow the person who is scrolling the words because they have no idea what your pacing is going to be. They have no idea where you want to slow things down, pick things up, what word you want to emphasize. Sometimes they're just going. And what you need to do is ask them very nicely, hey, would you mind just following me? And that's exactly what we did. We tried the voice-activated thing once or twice. I knew it wouldn't work, and it didn't. So I had the person follow me, and it made it really easy. And I was booked for a half day. We did 2 takes just because they wanted another option. And I was out of there in like 45 minutes. It was really, it was fun. It was interesting. It was enjoyable, and it was easy to do. And so anyhow, I just want to make sure that you know about those things. Prepare, read it over a lot of times, make sure you know all the understanding, all the words, you can pronounce everything. Practice using the prompter and make sure the person actually Follows your read. Hey, I just wanted to let you know, it would be great if, if you enjoyed this, you found it helpful, to make a donation. There's a PayPal link below. Love to have you make a donation, whether it's $5, $10, $20, whatever you can afford. I greatly appreciate it. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of time to, to prepare these videos, edit them, put them up online and upload them. So anyhow, love for you to do that. And also don't forget to subscribe and click the notification button so that way every time I upload a new video you'll be sent that information. If you have any questions at all, always feel free. You can reach out to me at aaron@howtoactamodel.com. You can visit my website howtomodel.com. And don't forget, you can check out my book It's How to Become a Successful Actor or Model. You can download it or order it at Amazon or on my personal website, howtoactandmodel.com/home, and just click on the book tab. I'm Aaron Marcus, and I can't wait to talk with you again soon. See ya. Bye.
