Talk2Camera
presentation skills

How to keep eye contact on camera

The lens is a few centimetres from the script. That gap is the whole problem.

On a phone, the front camera sits at the top of the screen and your script sits below it. Read the script and you are looking slightly down; look at the lens and you cannot read. The distance is small, and viewers notice it anyway.

Put the current line as close to the lens as the layout allows, and make the text large. A larger line means fewer eye movements per sentence, and fewer movements is what reads as eye contact.

Prop the phone further away if you can. At arm’s length the angle between the lens and the text is a few degrees; at thirty centimetres it is much more. This is the single biggest improvement most people can make, and it costs nothing.

Mentioned in this article

Typography and accessibility

Text size, line spacing, side margins and alignment, with five faces including Lexend and OpenDyslexic. Right-to-left scripts lay out correctly without a setting.

Prompter size and cover mode

Set how much of the screen the script takes. At the top of the range it covers the camera entirely and you show through behind it — for people who would rather not watch themselves while reading.

Eye contact and framing

How much of the take you spent looking at the lens, your longest look away, and how steady your framing was. When no face is found it reports zero rather than estimating.