# Premise card, consequence jump — rebuild sheet

A 46.6s restaurant sketch by @theowisseh — a "POV: if I could see the future" card opens a dinner scene, the bill turns out to be $3,000+, and a "2 Weeks Later" card jumps to an eviction notice on a door. 522,693 views · 21,146 likes.

**Why it works**

The premise card promises a payoff and then gets out of the way, so the middle of the video is a text-free scene the viewer has to actually watch to collect on it. The damage is then delivered by objects rather than by anyone saying it — an itemised receipt you can read, and a sign taped to a door — which is why the second card only has to stamp elapsed time for the whole joke to land.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 3.73s | Warm dim restaurant, raffia pendant lamps, bar behind. A bearded man in a black shirt and grey apron stands at the table mid-gesture, mid-speech, a folded pale blue card in his hand. Camera is low at seated height looking up — the vantage of someone at the table, with a wine bottle and menu edge blurred across the bottom of frame. | POV: if I could see the future 😂 |
| 11.19s | A woman with long curly hair in a cream top, at a heavy wooden table, holding an open dark-covered menu up in both hands, looking into it, mouth open mid-word. Window with blinds, brown curtain, painted brick, daylight from the right. Handheld three-quarter from across the table. | — |
| 18.65s | Tight macro down over two hands (cream jacket cuff) holding a printed receipt into the light. Header: ROCK STEADY, 907 Marietta St N.W., Atlanta GA. Dishes and drinks priced $200.00 to $1,000.00, subtotal $3,020.00, and a line reading "Included Gratuity (20.00%)" beside $604.00. | — |
| 26.11s | Same cuff, now outdoors on plain concrete pavement — the hands hold an iPhone showing the home screen and App Library at 3:43, thumb resting on the glass. | — |
| 33.57s | Second location, shot from behind: a man in a cream jacket and glasses reaching for a dark-framed glass storefront door with a printed "EVICTION NOTICE" sign taped to it at head height. Winter trees and a car park through the glass. Heavy motion blur across the whole frame. | 2 Weeks Later |
| 41.03s | Back in the opening restaurant — same pendant lamps, red-lit back bar, bar stools. A man in a cream jacket, shirt and tie, glasses and a stud earring, seated in the foreground, mouth open mid-speech, looking off to the right of camera. | — |

What the frames do not show, and I am not going to invent:

- **Whether the middle is an imagined future or straight chronology.** The opening line and the post caption ("Should've went to the bathroom and never came back 😂") both point at a flash-forward, but nothing in the pictures proves it.
- **Whether there is spoken dialogue.** Mouths are open in three of the six frames, so almost certainly yes — but there are no speech captions anywhere, so the frames cannot confirm it or tell you what is said.
- **The receipt's final total.** The header, the item prices, the $3,020.00 subtotal and the gratuity line are legible. The last figure is not.
- **How many cuts sit between samples**, and whether the camera moves inside any beat. Six stills across 46.6s cannot show that. Frame 5 is the only one with visible movement.

**What carries the value**

The itemised bill. It is held to the lens long enough to actually read $500 lamb chops, a $3,020.00 subtotal and a forced 20% gratuity — the numbers do the joke, not a line of dialogue. The eviction notice is the same trick a second time: a printed object standing in for the consequence. Rebuild this and the prop is the script; if your object doesn't read in one second at arm's length, the format has nothing to deliver.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera.** Phone, vertical, handheld throughout, no tripod. Two grammars only: (1) scene coverage from a seated diner's own height — low, looking slightly up at whoever is standing, real foreground clutter (bottle, lamp, menu edge) left in shot; (2) macro inserts shot straight down over the hands, object filling the centre. Cut hard between them. The consequence beat is a walking shot from behind, blur left in — the motion is what makes it read as a different day.
- **Light.** Whatever the room has. The restaurant beats are warm, dim and orange-heavy from the pendant lamps; the menu beat is daylight through blinds; the door beat is flat cold outdoor light. Do not match them — the change in light is doing the time jump alongside the card.
- **Wardrobe.** Ordinary and specific per role: an apron and black shirt for the staff member, a plain cream top for the guest, a cream jacket for the lead. Keep the lead in the identical jacket across the restaurant, the pavement and the door, so the same person is legible across three locations.
- **Cast.** Three people minimum — the lead, someone across the table, someone standing. They act; there is no way to shoot this with nobody in it.
- **The props are the build.** Print a real receipt with real absurd numbers on it, and print a real sign. Both have to survive being read at arm's length on a phone screen.

**Or generate it**

The receipt insert is the beat worth generating — it carries the payoff and has no face in it.

```
vertical 9:16 extreme close-up photograph shot straight down over {SUBJECT}'s own two hands
as they hold {PRODUCT} up at chest height and read it, {PRODUCT} filling the centre of frame
and lit noticeably brighter than everything behind it, a plain cream-white jacket cuff visible
at the wrist, {SUBJECT} seated at a dark restaurant table with a dark metal chair back and a
green glass bottle out of focus behind, warm dim interior restaurant light with one hard source
falling across {PRODUCT}, shallow depth of field, phone-camera look, slight grain, no retouching,
no on-screen text
```

**Motion:** handheld and tight over the hands at the seated subject's own eye line, drifting slightly as the hands turn {PRODUCT} into the light — no cut, no reframe away, {PRODUCT} never leaves the centre of frame.

**Text overlay pattern:** two cards only, both bold white condensed sans with a soft drop shadow, same centre-low position roughly two thirds down the frame.

- Opening beat — `POV: {the premise} {emoji}`
- The entire middle — nothing on screen at all
- The consequence beat, in a different place and time — `{elapsed time} Later`

No speech captions, no labels, nothing pinned across beats. The silence in the middle is the format; the moment you caption it, the props stop being the payoff.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DTgqLfbj26E/
