# Pinned-headline monologue — rebuild sheet

A 59.6s post by **wrd2jon**: 20 seconds of him playing basketball (his own clip, then a letterboxed clip from a game he didn't shoot), then a hard cut to his bedroom where he talks to camera for the rest of the runtime under one pinned line — **1,306,651 views, 100,674 likes**. The post has no caption text at all.

**Why it works** — The pinned line makes an outsized claim about the person on screen and then just sits there, so every sentence he speaks is read against a claim the viewer has already been handed; the two footage beats up front pay for that claim before it's made, so it lands as a boast the video has already earned rather than one it's asking you to accept. The speech captions underneath are cut off mid-sentence at every beat, including the last one sampled, so there's never a clean place to leave.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 4.76s | Handheld, shot by someone else, on an indoor court — blue and white floor lines, red padded walls. A young man with red-dyed locs drives a basketball past three or four other players. | `Friday night at Skyzone 🧡` |
| 14.29s | Hard cut to borrowed footage, letterboxed top and bottom: a full-court game, a USA Basketball logo burned into the source, players in white and black (42, 23, 45), crowd seated behind. Different camera, different grade — not his. | none |
| 23.82s | Hard cut to a locked chest-up bedroom frame. Same person, now in a red head wrap and dark brown hoodie, seated against a dark tufted headboard, ceiling fan above, purple LED strip on the wall. Holds a small sugar-coated item near his mouth, talking to the lens. | `when the hooper is hooping in 2 different games` / `HOOPER NOT JUST HOOPING,` |
| 33.35s | Identical frame. Headline changes once, then holds for the rest of the video. | `Pov: when the hooper might be prime kyrie Irving` / `YOU GO, YOU COULD,` |
| 42.88s | Identical frame. No reframe, no cutaway. | `Pov: when the hooper might be prime kyrie Irving` / `THE GAME FOR` |
| 52.41s | Identical frame, held to the end, caption still mid-sentence. | `Pov: when the hooper might be prime kyrie Irving` / `NEXT GENERATION OF NEW,` |

**What carries the value** — The pinned comparison headline, held over his own unmoving face for the whole back half and paid for in advance by the opening footage. The speech captions never finish a sentence, so the claim is the only thing on screen that ever resolves.

**Where the frames don't tell you:**
- He holds a small frosted, sugar-coated item up near his mouth in all four monologue beats. It is never labelled, never named on screen, and never demonstrated — the frames don't identify what it is or whether it's the point of the video.
- Six stills across 59.6s can't show whether the monologue is genuinely one unbroken take or whether there are cuts between the sampled beats. What is certain is that the framing, room and angle are identical at 23.82, 33.35, 42.88 and 52.41 — if there are cuts, they're on the same setup.
- Nothing in the frames says where the borrowed 14.29s clip came from, or whether he's in it.
- There is no audio evidence here. The captions read as his own speech, but that's inferred from the caption style, not shown.

**Shoot it**

- **Two cameras' worth of material, one afternoon.** Act one: hand your phone to someone at the venue and have them shoot you doing the thing, handheld, from a normal spectator distance — unstable is correct, it reads as caught. One clip is enough; the second clip is borrowed from a bigger, better-shot version of the same activity, left letterboxed so the seam is visible rather than hidden.
- **Act two is the whole rebuild.** Phone propped or held at arm's length, chest-up, square-on, sitting on the floor or a low seat with your bed behind you. Set it and do not touch it again — no zoom, no reframe, no second angle, no cutaway for the remaining 35 seconds.
- **Light:** ordinary room light on the face, warm and flat. The colour in this frame comes from one cheap LED strip on the wall behind, not from a lighting setup. Don't light it properly — properly lit breaks it.
- **Room:** your actual bedroom, visibly lived in. Headboard and pillows fill the background; a ceiling fan overhead is fine and reads as real.
- **Wardrobe:** a hoodie and a head wrap. No styling, no change between the court and the bedroom beyond what would actually change.
- **Text:** the headline goes top third, plain white, lowercase, and once it lands it does not move or change again. Speech captions go bottom third, bold all-caps, one clause per beat, each card cut off mid-sentence with one word boxed in red. Never let a caption card complete a thought.

**Or generate it**

The beat worth generating is 33.35s — the locked bedroom frame with the headline pinned. Everything after it is the same frame again.

```
vertical 9:16, {SUBJECT} seated chest-up in their own bedroom, dark hooded
sweatshirt, a fabric head wrap over their hair, talking straight to a fixed
phone camera at arm's length, a dark tufted upholstered headboard and pillows
filling the frame behind them, a ceiling fan with a light fitting overhead, a
strip of purple LED lights running along the wall, {PRODUCT} held up in one
hand near their mouth, soft warm room light on the face with the wall reading
lavender behind, phone front-camera look, slight grain, no retouching, no
on-screen text
```

**Motion:** camera fixed and identical for every beat — no zoom, no reframe, no cutaway; only the speaker's face and the hand holding {PRODUCT} move. Generate every monologue beat from the same seed so the room matches exactly.

**Text overlay pattern:**
- Top third, two lines, plain white sans-serif, lowercase — pinned unchanged once it lands: `Pov: when the {role} might be {named great}`
- The first monologue beat may run a setup variant before it: `when the {role} is {doing the thing} in 2 different {contexts}`
- Bottom third, bold all-caps white, one clause per beat, cut off mid-sentence, one word per card boxed in red: `{CLAUSE FRAGMENT},`
- The footage cold-open carries its own separate line, top-centre and casual: `{day or occasion} at {venue} {emoji}`

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DbOyb1ZvU50/
