KEEP ON SCROLLIN'! Book World Prompter for your broadcast, live event, commercial, and industrial prompting. New York City's Ian McGrady provides intelligent, contextually-aware prompting to corporate clients, as well as training and speech writing.
Monday, February 21, 2011
This takes a committee of people to arrive at this now famous moment
http://www.losteyeball.com/index.php/2008/12/08/way-to-read-the-teleprompter/
You can't just blame the talent here. The producer has to see it's just in the end a thin line between one story and the next. The transitions have to be talent-proof. The way some writers write, they just write the story and that's necessary in an environment where a producer just wants to slide stories around like blocks.
But the newscast isn't just the story - it's the flow and transitions as any producer will tell you, and that's the lyrical part of the job.
If you're a producer, you have an obligation to study the talent and know what they're going to do with the text.
If you're talent, you have an obligation to try to not find a catch-all style that "works for everything" because obviously it doesn't. You can just click through channels and see who is "doing their style" and who has actually read and understood if not the entire story, the part that they're responsible for.
If you're the prompter, you have an obligation to indicate to the talent, very slightly, that a new story has come up but sliding the top of the next story to the top of the glass, and "imaging" (freezing) slightly - giving them a visual cue that a new story has come up.
Prompting effectively is very much about very close communication through the tools. Prompting isn't writing and it isn't reading - it's an idiom unto itself, and an operator has habits that they adjust for the talent.
Don't just look at this anchor and say, "what a dope". These things happen by committee and everyone is part of it. Even the prompter.
You can't just blame the talent here. The producer has to see it's just in the end a thin line between one story and the next. The transitions have to be talent-proof. The way some writers write, they just write the story and that's necessary in an environment where a producer just wants to slide stories around like blocks.
But the newscast isn't just the story - it's the flow and transitions as any producer will tell you, and that's the lyrical part of the job.
If you're a producer, you have an obligation to study the talent and know what they're going to do with the text.
If you're talent, you have an obligation to try to not find a catch-all style that "works for everything" because obviously it doesn't. You can just click through channels and see who is "doing their style" and who has actually read and understood if not the entire story, the part that they're responsible for.
If you're the prompter, you have an obligation to indicate to the talent, very slightly, that a new story has come up but sliding the top of the next story to the top of the glass, and "imaging" (freezing) slightly - giving them a visual cue that a new story has come up.
Prompting effectively is very much about very close communication through the tools. Prompting isn't writing and it isn't reading - it's an idiom unto itself, and an operator has habits that they adjust for the talent.
Don't just look at this anchor and say, "what a dope". These things happen by committee and everyone is part of it. Even the prompter.
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