# Running caption over borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 22.66s post that is almost entirely footage the poster did not shoot: two sourced clinical clips of a tattoo handpiece worked over stretch-marked skin, played as inset cards over his own blurred plate, with one cut to himself full-frame in the middle. 1,344,902 views · 11,847 likes · caption: "Comment the word Simpletics for a surprise".

## Why it works

The proof is somebody else's clinical macro footage — unretouched skin, a gloved hand, a real instrument — which buys authority and production value the poster could never shoot himself, and which nobody reads as an ad because it plainly wasn't made as one. His own contribution is narration and one face beat, so the viewer never loses the thread of who is talking, and the running word-by-word caption means the sentence is always mid-flight with no clean place to leave.

## The beats

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 1.81s | Composite. Inset card of sourced macro footage fills the upper frame: white-gloved hand, tattoo handpiece (black grip, orange cartridge) against deeply stretch-marked abdominal skin. A small cut-out talking-head panel — a man in a blue shirt, not the poster — is pinned bottom-left of that card. Behind it, the poster's own shot shows only as a heavy blur with a microphone readable in it. | — |
| 5.44s | Same composite, same clip, handpiece closer against the same skin. The pinned panel man is mid-word, eyes closed. | — |
| 9.06s | The composite drops. Poster full-frame, chest-up: dark curly hair, plain black crew-neck tee, handheld microphone, bare pale wall behind with a light furniture edge at his shoulder. Straight to the lens. | `tattoo` |
| 12.69s | Back into the composite — the same sourced clip as beats 1 and 2, identical framing. Panel still pinned, plate still blurred. | — |
| 16.32s | Composite with a visibly different second sourced clip: raised red-pink stretch marks, a purple-gloved hand working a fine instrument, the source's own two-line label burned in top-left. Same pinned panel bottom-left. | `Inkless stretch mark revision` (burned into the sourced clip, not added by the poster) |
| 19.94s | Second clip held, framing unchanged; the panel man now looking straight down the lens. | `Inkless stretch mark revision` |

**What the frames do not show, and I have not filled in:** whether a caption runs on every beat — only the 9.06s beat carries text of the poster's own, and a single centred word is all the evidence there is that it is a word-by-word speech track. There is no audio in a contact sheet, so the narration is inferred, not read. Nothing past 19.94s is sampled, so the closing beat and any on-screen CTA are unknown. The two sourced clips appear to come from the same third-party creator (the pinned panel looks like the same man in both), but the frames cannot confirm it, and there is no visible credit anywhere.

## What carries the value

The sourced clinical footage. A tattoo handpiece running over deep stretch marks on real unretouched skin, then the same procedure on a second body. The poster demonstrates nothing, holds nothing, proves nothing — his one full-frame beat only names the thing. Swap the sourced clips for weaker footage and the post is worth nothing.

## Shoot it

You are shooting one thing and sourcing the rest.

- **Your beat (one shot, 3–5 seconds of screen time):** chest-up, phone on a tripod or propped at eye height, square-on. Bare pale wall, nothing styled behind you — a furniture edge in shot is fine and reads as real. Plain dark crew-neck tee, no logo, no jewellery competing. Even frontal light — a window in front of you, or a lamp bounced off the wall behind the phone. Hold a handheld mic; it is visible in the frames and it does the "this is a person who knows something" job on its own.
- **The rest:** find the clinical or procedural footage first, before you write a word. It has to be macro, unretouched, and shot by someone who was actually doing the procedure. If your sourced clip already carries the other creator's face panel and their own burned-in label, leave both in — this post does, and it reads as provenance rather than sloppiness. Credit the source in your post caption.
- **The composite:** your own shot is the background layer, scaled full-frame, heavily blurred and darkened so it is unreadable. The sourced clip sits on top as a card in the upper two-thirds. Do not animate either layer — no zooms, no pans, no transitions.
- **The edit:** open on the sourced footage, not on yourself. Cut to your full-frame beat once, around the 40% mark, on the word that names the mechanism. Cut back into the composite. Change to a second sourced clip for the last third and hold it to the end.
- **The gate:** the ask lives in the post caption only — "Comment the word {WORD} for a surprise" — never on screen.

## Or generate it

The beat worth generating is the composite at 1.81s: the evidence card over the dead, blurred plate.

```
vertical 9:16 composite frame — upper two thirds is an inset card of macro
clinical footage: a white-gloved hand holding {PRODUCT} against the bare,
deeply textured skin of {SUBJECT}, skin filling the card edge to edge, plain
even indoor light, shallow depth, no face in the card; behind and below the
card the speaker plate shows through heavily blurred and darkened — a person
in a plain dark crew-neck tee holding a handheld microphone against a bare
pale wall, frontal even light; phone-camera look, slight grain, no
retouching, no on-screen text
```

**Motion:** both layers locked — the blurred speaker plate never moves or comes into focus, and the only movement anywhere is the gloved hand travelling {PRODUCT} across the skin inside the evidence card.

**Text overlay:** one spoken word at a time, centred, bold white with a heavy black outline, replaced every beat as the narration runs — `{word}` — and the sourced clip's own burned-in label left untouched where it sits in the card's top-left: `{Procedure name}`.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DT3qvRHAR7e/ — @dillonxlatham
