I film short videos. Phone with no stand, on my laptop, one take if I’m lucky.

The problem I noticed : I know the topic. I wrote the script. Then the camera starts and I forget the second half of my own sentence. So I look down at my notes, and now the video has a guy reading off a screen. You can see it in the eyes.

So I went looking for a teleprompter.

What I found⌗

Most of them wanted an account. Some wanted a subscription. Some had overkill features, noise I didn’t need for the simple task I have at hand : notes while I am filming.

And almost all of them had a speed slider that goes from 1 to 10. That one bothered me more than it should have. What is 6? Six what? I set it to 6, start reading, and immediately I’m either racing the text or waiting for it. Then I stop the take, nudge it to 5, start again. Three takes burned before I said a single word.

So with the power of AI and anime on my side, I built my own and called it telele (If you have another suggestion hit me up).

The two decisions that actually matter⌗

Everything else in the app is a slider. These two are the reason I use it.

  • Speed is in words per minute. Not 1 to 10. Real words and real minutes. Average speech is somewhere around 130 to 150 wpm. I set 135 and it scrolls at 135, and it tells me the script is 1:48 long before I hit record. That last part turned out to be worth more than the scrolling. Instagram wants under 90 seconds. Now I know before I film, not after I edit. I cut two sentences in the editor instead of cutting a whole take.

  • There’s an eye line. A single line across the screen with corner ticks, and everything above and below it fades out. The trick with a teleprompter is not the scrolling. It’s where your eyes go. If there’s one line and everything else is dim, your eyes stop moving. Put the sentence you’re saying on that line and you’re looking straight ahead. That was the difference between “he’s reading” and “he’s talking.”

The small things I added because I kept needing them⌗

  • Any line starting with // shows up highlighted and doesn’t count toward the read time. It’s a note to me, not to the camera. B-roll goes here. As a network engineer, using // for a comment felt like a weird choice.
  • The text pane is resizable. Drag the bar, dock it left or right, give your phone stand whatever room it needs.
  • A 3-2-1 countdown, so I can hit record and get my face in order before the text starts moving.
  • Keyboard control, because why not? Space to start and stop. R to go back to the top.

Is it good?⌗

If you read this whole thing, that is for you to decide. Feel free to use it and let me know what you think about it. It’s a toy. It has exactly one user and that user is me.

But it does the thing. I filmed with it and I stopped burning takes on speed adjustments.

That’s the whole argument for building small tools. Not that they’re better than what exists. Most of the time they aren’t. It’s that you can make them fit the exact shape of your problem. It’s currently live at telele.fluka.dev and the code is on GitHub.