Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
PROVO — When Brigham Arce discovered how expensive teleprompters are, he decided that as an engineer he could just build his own.
At the time, Arce was trying to film a video for another project, but he was struggling to memorize lines. He designed a prototype teleprompter of his own and found that by reducing the size of the teleprompter, he could also reduce the cost and make it more portable.
Arce continued to perfect his design and its fifth iteration was recently launched on Kickstarter as The Parrot teleprompter, quickly catching the attention of blogs and others. It was fully funded within four days and raised more than $45,000 as of Friday, with 493 backers.
“I really liked how it works, so I decided to put (The Parrot) on Kickstarter,” Arce said. “It’s pretty phenomenal. I didn’t expect it to fund that quick. I set a $30,000 goal and then I thought that would take me the whole funding time, which was 30 days.”
The teleprompter was designed for video professionals, bloggers and others to use with DSLR and mirrorless cameras, according to Arce. He said the compact teleprompter uses a two-way mirror to reflect text playing on a smartphone, so the person speaking can see their lines while looking at the camera.
Arce said the greatest benefits of the teleprompter are that it is compact, affordable and easy to set up. His background in manufacturing engineering technology, which he studied at Brigham Young University, helped him to keep the design simple for retail production.
This is the first retail project Arce has designed for mass production on his own. He created The Parrot as a pet project while continuing work as an engineer for heating and cooling systems, but he has plans to launch many more of his creations. He said his dream job is to be an inventor.
“I have been building things since I was little,” he said. “When my friends would call me to go play sometimes I was the little nerdy kid who was reading college textbooks and building robots. That’s what I liked to do.”
The Parrot Kickstarter runs through Jan. 14, and the teleprompter can be purchased starting at $90 through the campaign. He plans to use funds earned from the project to manufacture more teleprompters and continue selling The Parrot through his website, Amazon.com and other select retailers for $150.
