# Running-caption borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 21.22s explainer by @davidjustinn — six borrowed clips of a liquid turning solid on contact, cut under one continuous narration, with a small talking-head panel pinned across the bottom the whole time. 7,448,515 views · 60,651 likes.

**Why it works** — None of the footage is his: the value is entirely in the sequencing of other people's most impossible-looking moments, so the ceiling on the visuals is far above what one shoot could produce. The caption is the narration chopped so that every frame ends mid-sentence ("VINEGAR AND", "AND IF YOU"), which means there is no beat in the video where a sentence has finished and the viewer is free to leave.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 1.7s | Borrowed clip: a man in a backwards cap and a black "#BEAST" tee, mouth open mid-yell, bright room with a poster board and pinned artwork behind him, holding a jar of white foamy material. Narrator panel appears pinned at the bottom and stays there for the rest of the video. | THE JAR |
| 5.09s | Borrowed clip: close on a hand pushed down into a big glass jar of cloudy liquid on a wooden counter, fingers submerged, warm indoor light. | FROM THE COLD |
| 8.49s | Borrowed clip: a graduated glass beaker of clear liquid on a black metal grate, flat black background, hard side light — lab-bench look. | VINEGAR AND |
| 11.88s | Borrowed clip: outdoors, dim, a figure in black crouched over a circular white patch on concrete, spreading it outward in a plume. | ONCE IT COOLS |
| 15.28s | Borrowed clip: black seamless, a hand drops a small red object onto a white crystalline mound blooming out of the top of a tall glass of liquid. | AND RELEASES |
| 18.67s | Borrowed clip: black seamless, a hand tips a glass of clear liquid and the stream sets into a white crystalline tower as it lands. | AND IF YOU |

The caption at the last sampled beat is still unfinished, so the narration runs past 18.67s to the end. The six stills are sampled roughly 3.4s apart — there are almost certainly cuts between them that the sheet does not show, so treat six as the minimum number of clips, not the total.

**What carries the value** — The escalating physical impossibility in the borrowed clips: liquid that turns solid the instant it is touched or poured. The caption does the retention work by never completing a sentence; the narrator panel does none of the persuading, it only puts a face on the account.

**Shoot it**

- **Sourcing over shooting.** Five of the six beats are footage from elsewhere, in five different rooms with five different lighting setups — the mismatch is not a flaw, it reads as "I went and found all of this". Budget your time on collecting six to ten of the most extreme clips of one mechanism, not on production.
- **Order them by escalation.** Beat 1 is a loud human reaction, beats 2–4 are ordinary rooms and daylight, beats 5–6 are black-background studio shots where the effect is at its most impossible. The look gets cleaner and the effect gets bigger as it goes.
- **The narrator panel.** A bearded man in a plain pink shirt, chest-up, flat frontal framing, static, occupying the bottom strip of the frame from the first beat to the last. No performance visible in any frame — he is talking, not acting. Phone at eye height, arm's length, any even indoor light. The frames do not show what room he is in; the background behind him is not readable at this size.
- **The caption.** Auto-caption style: all caps, white, heavy black outline, centred, sitting just above the narrator panel. Cut the narration so each fragment ends on a conjunction, article or preposition.
- **A face is required.** This one is not talent-free — a person is on screen for the entire runtime. But it is the cheapest kind of talent: a static bug, no blocking, no wardrobe, no room.

**Or generate it** — for the money beat (the pour that sets solid, 18.67s):

```
vertical 9:16 photograph, flat black seamless background filling the frame,
a bare hand entering from the top of frame tipping {PRODUCT} so it pours in
a stream, hard directional key light from camera left picking out the edge of
the stream, everything else falling to black, close product-demo framing at
the height of the pour, phone-camera look, slight grain, no on-screen text,
no visible {SUBJECT} face or body beyond the hand and wrist
```

**Motion:** camera locked and still on a tripod, no zoom and no drift — only the pour and the hand move, one unbroken take, the transformation completing inside the shot.

**Text overlay:** one fragment of a single continuous narration per beat, all-caps white with a heavy black outline, centred and low, sitting just above the pinned narrator panel: `"{FRAGMENT}"` — every fragment is grammatically incomplete on its own ({FRAGMENT} ends on a conjunction, an article or a preposition), so no frame ever contains a finished sentence.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DSfi456k75D/
