how to record selfie video for social media

talking-head clips live or die on one thing: where your eyes go. get that right and the rest is framing, light, and not fumbling for the screen mid-take. here's a setup that does all of it with the phone you already own.

eye-line is the whole game#

when you read off a script, your gaze drifts to wherever the words are. the viewer feels it instantly. so the words need to sit as close to the lens as possible.

most teleprompter apps do the opposite. they jam the camera feed full-frame behind your text, which is exactly where a wall of moving words pulls your focus the most. you end up reading at the words, not at the camera.

open prompter doesn't do that. the camera is a small picture-in-picture tile you place yourself. drag it right up under the front lens, near the top of the screen, and your eyes barely move off-axis. tap the tile to promote it to a full-screen "how do I look?" preview, check your framing, tap minimize to drop it back to a tile.

and if you read better without seeing yourself, turn the camera off entirely. the chip cycles off, PiP, off. your call, not the app's.

frame it and light it#

this part is short because it's mostly common sense that people skip.

• eyes in the top third. not centered. leave headroom up top, put your eyes about a third of the way down the frame. it reads as intentional instead of like a security cam.
• face a window. daylight on your face beats any ring light you'll buy this week. sit so the window is in front of you, not behind. backlight turns you into a silhouette.
• mount the phone, don't hold it. a cheap tripod or a stack of books. a held phone wobbles and your arm gets tired three takes in.
• lens at eye height. shooting up your nose is a look. it's not the look you want.

shoot one take, crop every platform#

you don't have to commit to 9:16 before you press record. open prompter shoots five aspect ratios: 9:16 vertical, 1:1 square, 4:3 classic, 16:9 horizontal, and open gate.

if you know the clip is only going to one place, pick that ratio and you're done. if it's going to a few places, shoot open gate. on iphone 17 the front sensor is square, so open gate captures the whole thing at 3840 by 3840. you perform once, then crop a 9:16, a 1:1, and a 16:9 out of the same take in your editor. one read, every platform, no reshoot. more on why open gate matters.

don't touch the screen mid-take#

reaching for the phone to start, stop, or scroll wrecks the take. there are three ways around it.

• hardware capture buttons. the volume buttons, the Action button, and Camera Control on iOS 17.2+ all start and stop recording while the phone is mounted and untouched. press, perform, press.
• voice tracking. on-device speech recognition listens to your delivery and advances the page when you actually say the words. no thumb on the screen, no guessing at a scroll speed, and nothing leaves the phone. it's tuned by two draggable lines, READ and FEATHER. here's how to set them.
• a Bluetooth remote. pair any remote or keyboard and bind play, pause, scroll, and jump-back-to-the-start-of-the-take. handy when you're standing a few feet off the phone.

between voice tracking and a remote, you can run a whole shoot without leaning into frame to poke at glass.

save the take next to the script#

when you stop, the recording saves to Photos by default. but there's a better spot for it.

flip on "save next to the script" in Settings. now the finished .mov writes to the same folder as the .md you were reading. if that script lives in a shared iCloud, Dropbox, or Obsidian folder, iCloud delivers the take to your mac sitting right beside the script. no Photos library hunt, no AirDrop dance. if a collaborator shared the folder, the take shows up for them too.

so the file you cut from is already next to the words you said. that's the point.

your first take#

a five-step run-through:

1. point open prompter at the folder where your script lives, open the script.
2. set the PiP tile near the top, right under the lens. or turn the camera off if you read better blind.
3. frame it: eyes in the top third, window light on your face, phone mounted at eye height.
4. pick your aspect, or shoot open gate to crop later.
5. press a hardware button to roll, read it, press to stop. the take lands in your script folder.

then watch it back once and shoot it again. the second take is always better.

open prompter is free and open source. if it saved you from a subscription or a reshoot, that's the whole idea.