Teleprompter Potential Disasters

There are a lot of different kinds of teleprompters these days.

Some of them you can adjust with an old fashioned knob yourself.

Some of them with a mouse.

Some of them with a foot pedal and others you have an actual teleprompter operator someone else doing it for you.

There are pitfalls with all of these and there are certain things you need to do to protect yourself.

And I want to go over some of those steps right now so that you’re not left unguarded.

If you are going to have another teleprompter operator moving it you’ve cut to rehearse with that person and you have to make sure that person is following you.

Otherwise you get back to the same speed the same tone.

The reason people do this is they are afraid that the words are going to go off the screen and they won’t know what to say.

So you have to be in sync with your teleprompter operator.

If you pause they better stop because if they keep rolling and you’re pausing you’re up a creek without a paddle.

You are in big big trouble so you need to find somebody who’s reliable someone willing to practice with you or you have to think twice about even using a teleprompter.

The next thing you have to be prepared for is a teleprompter is used as a part of a computer.

Even if it’s an iPhone.

Guess what about computers.

They break.

They have glitches they malfunction.

They like electricity.

They get bugs in them all of which to say is you still need to have your speech on paper at least notes.

I prefer having notes consolidated on a single sheet.

But if you really want to get every single word just write you’d better have it all on paper because paper doesn’t require electricity.

Paper doesn’t have glitches on it typically.

So it’s a good fallback.

I hope you don’t have to use it but it’s there if you need it.

There’s all sorts of problems that can happen with computers.

Most famously when Bill Clinton was president and giving his nineteen ninety five State of the Union.

What happened was it was uploaded into the teleprompter software as State of the Union when the person uploaded it.

It said Do you want to delete State of the Union.

No.

Why do I want to do that I’m putting it in.

So person put.

No and there it was.

The union is in the teleprompter.

He thought everything was fine.

President Clinton gets up to give his State of the Union.

He looks at it and he instantly realizes oh no that’s last year’s State of the Union.

So he turns around the whole world is watching.

Whispers to Vice President Gore and his call Stephanopoulos and get the correct speech we have last year’s speech.

Now Bill Clinton who even then was an extraordinarily experienced public speaker a gifted public speaker and has according to many a near photographic memory.

So he was able to give the first 10 minutes of his speech in a way that no one had any idea there was a problem.

But you don’t want to have to rely on that.

So assume nothing.

Practice.

Make sure you’ve got a safety habit on paper and do that and you will minimize your chances of disaster.