# Running caption, borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 33s home-remedy skincare recipe told straight to camera by an older woman in her own front room, cut to close-ups of the ingredients and of other people's skin, with her speech burned in as captions the whole way — 5,407,890 views, 126,965 likes (@mayalin_wellness).

**Why it works**

The captions are the retention device: they arrive as 2–4 word mid-sentence fragments, one word punched yellow, so the viewer is always finishing a sentence that hasn't landed yet, and every fragment names a thing they already have in a cupboard. The speaker is never gone — a small cut-out of her stays pasted in the corner over every cutaway — so the cutaways read as her showing you something rather than as a break, and the payoff she's building toward is withheld and traded for a comment ("Comment SKIN").

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 2.68s | Locked macro on a kitchen counter: white powder pours from a container into an open jar of thick white product, label only part-legible. Small cut-out of the speaker pasted bottom-left, talking. | BAKING **SODA** |
| 8.03s | High close on a clear glass bowl of honey with a yolk-coloured blob in it; a spoon tips white powder in. Marble worktop, folded white towel, small succulent behind. Speaker cut-out still bottom-left. | **HONEY** |
| 13.38s | Cut to the speaker herself, chest-up at eye level, seated in a bright room — window onto a green yard, shelves of labelled herb jars, plants, small US flag. Mid-sentence, one hand raised toward camera. | A **BOWL** AND |
| 18.74s | Extreme close-up of a different, younger woman's face, yellow-beige paste streaked across forehead, nose and cheek. Speaker cut-out bottom-left. | TO YOUR **FACE** |
| 24.09s | Macro of skin only — cheek and jaw with dark spots and visible texture. No face context, no product on it. Speaker cut-out bottom-left. | **BRIGHTEN** THE FACE |
| 29.44s | Back to the speaker, same seat and room, wider, hands folded in her lap for the close. | **ROUTINE** FOR CLEAR |

Bold = the word set in yellow; the rest of each line is white. The frames don't show what's between these six samples, so cut count and shot lengths are unknown — treat the beat order as the evidence, not the edit rhythm.

**What carries the value**

The named pantry ingredients. BAKING SODA and HONEY land as captions over shots of them being poured and mixed, so the recipe reads as something the viewer already owns the parts of — no purchase between them and trying it. The full routine is never given; it's held back for the comment.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera:** two setups only. One tripod, eye-level, chest-up on the speaker seated in a real room, window light on her face and a window visible behind — that's the spine, and you return to it to close. One locked macro on a counter for each ingredient; no camera moves anywhere, the pour and the stir are the only motion.
- **Light:** daylight through a window in both setups, so the counter shots and the talking shots read as the same afternoon in the same house.
- **Wardrobe:** one solid, distinctive top worn for the whole shoot. The corner cut-out is tiny, so the speaker has to be recognisable by colour and silhouette alone.
- **The corner cut-out:** cut her out of the talking-head take and paste her, hard-edged, bottom-left over every cutaway at a fixed size and position. She keeps talking there while the cutaway plays.
- **Captions:** burn in her actual speech in 2–4 word all-caps chunks, centre-low, one key word in yellow per chunk. Chunks break mid-sentence on purpose. Don't switch to a static headline.
- **Cutaways:** they don't have to be yours. Two are of people who aren't the speaker — a stranger's masked face, an anonymous macro of spotted skin — and nothing in frame ties them to her room.
- **The close:** the last line is the ask, and the caption carries it: a "Pharmacies don't want you to know this!" opener plus "Comment [WORD] if you want my full routine". The video gives the ingredients and withholds the routine.

**Two things the frames make plain, said honestly:** a "Veo" watermark sits in the bottom-right of both talking-head frames, so that footage is AI-generated rather than filmed — the format is proven with a synthetic presenter. And there is no before/after pair here: only one macro of damaged skin, with no clear-skin counterpart in the sampled frames, so don't build the rebuild around a transformation the original never shows.

**Or generate it**

The hook beat — the first ingredient pour with the speaker inset:

```
vertical 9:16 macro photograph on a home kitchen counter, white powder pouring
in a thin stream from a container into an open jar of {PRODUCT}, the jar's label
only partly legible, marble worktop, a folded white towel and a small green plant
soft behind, daylight from a window to one side, shallow depth of field,
phone-camera look, slight grain, no retouching, no on-screen text; in the
bottom-left corner a small hard-edged cut-out of {SUBJECT} mid-sentence, lit the
same, pasted flat over the frame
```

**Motion:** camera locked — the only movement is the pour landing in the jar, and the corner cut-out of {SUBJECT} talking at a fixed size and position.

**Text overlay:** `{2-4 WORD SPEECH CHUNK, ALL CAPS}` with `{ONE KEY WORD}` in yellow and the rest white, centre-low, swapping roughly every second to track the voiceover — chunks are mid-sentence fragments, never complete lines.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZk6uD7xT2r/
