A teleprompter for internal comms — policy, onboarding and leadership video at volume

Internal video is a volume problem wearing a production costume. Onboarding modules, the benefits-enrolment window, quarterly policy updates, a leadership message a month — call it forty short videos a year, made by a two-person comms team for whom video is one line of the job description. Each video is small. Together they are a production schedule nobody planned, running alongside the intranet, the newsletter and everything else. And the deadlines are never yours: enrolment opens when it opens, the policy takes effect on the first of the month, and the video is late the moment the announcement email goes out without it.

Series consistency is where it shows. Onboarding module seven sits on the intranet next to module two, recorded five months earlier — different framing, different energy, different room — and the seam tells every new starter the company stopped caring halfway through. The wording is load-bearing too: what the video says about the expenses policy is what employees will quote back at HR, and “but the video said” is a sentence you only need to hear once. Legal reviewed the line about probation for a reason.

Then there is how it is actually watched: on the intranet at a desk, on a phone in a warehouse break room, muted in an open-plan office. Captions are not a nice-to-have — they are how most of the workforce consumes the message, and for some of it an accessibility obligation. Auto-generated captions that mangle the pension scheme’s name do it in front of the whole company. Fixing them by hand, video after video, is a job nobody costed.

The leadership message means booking the exec: ten minutes between meetings, a script from comms, and either an agency crew at a day rate or a phone and hope. Fluffed lines eat the slot; the third retake is where the exec’s patience goes, and everybody in the room knows there will not be a fourth booking this quarter. An agency crew solves the polish and multiplies the cost — which is how the year’s video budget quietly becomes six videos instead of forty.

The rest gets shot ad hoc, whenever a policy lands — no batching, no consistent setup, a different corner of the office each time. And afterwards someone in comms sits retiming the intranet platform’s auto-captions by hand, because the guesses were wrong exactly where the wording mattered.

The script library holds the quarter’s scripts in folders per series — onboarding, policy, leadership — with a word count and an estimated read time on each. That last number turns the exec’s ten minutes into a plan rather than a gamble: three ninety-second scripts fit the slot, four do not, and you know it before anyone is standing in front of a camera. The wording legal reviewed is the wording on screen, and when a policy is amended, the script is edited once — the re-record reads the amended line, not the version somebody remembered.

Pause and resume keeps a single take alive through real life. A sip of water, a phone buzzing, a stumbled line and a breath to reset — pause, resume, carry on. The paused time is excluded from the file rather than sitting there as dead air, so a leadership message survives its interruptions without becoming an editing job afterwards.

The takes library keeps a batch session sane. Thursday’s recording block leaves six takes, each with its own poster frame, length, size and date — so nobody plays guess-the-file with “which one was the pension video” a week later, and any take opens straight into the editor for the trim. Six takes, six poster frames, no mystery files.

Captions export as a separate .srt in the wording of the reviewed script — most intranet video platforms want the file rather than burned-in text, and the scheme names come out spelled the way legal spelled them. When the same message also goes public, the platform presets handle the shapes: LinkedIn keeps your frame, the vertical feeds get 9:16. One honest note: exports on the free tier carry a small Talk2Camera mark, so a team shipping branded video to the whole company will want the paid plan.

Tuesday, 9:40. The COO has until 9:55. Three scripts are loaded and read-timed in advance — the benefits window opening, the hybrid-work policy update, a welcome for the new-starter cohort — four and a half minutes of reading in a fifteen-minute slot, same chair and framing as last month’s batch. She pauses twice mid-message, once for water and once when a phone goes off next door; neither pause exists in the files, and none of the three messages became separate fragments to stitch together afterwards.

By 9:55 there are three takes in the library, each identifiable at a glance by its poster frame and length. Comms trims the top and tail of each, exports with an .srt, and the videos are on the intranet by Friday — captioned in the wording legal reviewed, including the pension scheme name the platform’s auto-captions got wrong last quarter. The next batch is already booked: first Tuesday of next month, same chair.