Toby Smith

Posts for August 2013

How to bodge an autocue

4th August 2013

Autocues are really quite simple things; consisting of a camera, a screen, and a piece of glass. They allow you to read off your words, whilst looking straight at the camera.

Adhoc Autocue

I cobbled mine together from a PS:Eye, piece of glass from a photo-frame, and an iPad.
The most irritating thing was getting the text to display. I didn’t check for an app that would scroll the text. In the end I just had a static image (just rememeber to flip it about the y-axis).

The construction was just from junk I had on my desk. Sometimes a little mess can be helpful (that’s my excuse).

It worked, but wasn’t great. The text I was reading was very small (no scrolling), so you can see my eyes scanning across. Having bigger, scrolling text would have been a bonus. Being further from the set up with the camera zoomed in more would probably mitigate the “scanning eyes” too.

All in all it was a lot of fun to build but it’s probably easier to just learn your lines!

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