# Captioned steps, comment gate — rebuild sheet

A founder stands in one spot, pins a stack of real comment screenshots over the opening beat, then answers them by walking through how to use his product step by step — 41.98s, 1,062,112 views, 20,719 likes, by smileillume.

## Why it works

The screenshotted questions are from actual strangers, so everything after them reads as an answer someone asked for rather than a pitch — nobody argues with an answer they requested. Then the full operating routine is handed over free while the product itself stays behind a comment-to-get gate in the post caption, so the value arrives before the ask.

## The beats

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 3.36s | Arm's-length front-facing frame, chest-up. Man in a dark hooded sweatshirt, plain white wall, ceiling vent above, a mirror and doorway behind his shoulder. He holds a white brush head up beside his face. Three screenshotted comment cards sit tilted and overlapping in the empty upper-left. | Cards: "Does it work with braces if so im sold" · "Is it gentle on the enamel tho?" · a third card, only partly legible, asking about whitening toothpaste. Subtitle: "there's been hundreds of questions about my companies invention" |
| 10.08s | Same frame, same distance. Both hands up at chest height — one on the handle, the other laying a stripe of toothpaste onto the head, turned toward the lens. | "just press the button once and then apply the toothpaste as it rotates" |
| 16.79s | Same frame, held slightly lower so his mouth is centred. The loaded brush held horizontally across frame at mouth level, both hands on it. | "brush all the different quadrants of your mouth" |
| 23.51s | The brush head pushed close to the lens, its bristle surface and channel filling the centre. His open palm raised behind it as a plain backdrop, face mostly hidden. The camera did not move — the product came to it. | "to get in between the grooves of your teeth" |
| 30.23s | Same frame. A branded white pump bottle held up in one hand, two competitor toothpaste tubes in the other — one clearly a Crest 3D White carton — presented side by side. | "does it work with other toothpaste" |
| 36.94s | Same frame. One open hand raised across the lower half of his face mid-gesture, the brush held up on the other side. Same room, same wardrobe, same distance as beat one. | "developing the perfect toothbrush" |

**What the frames do not show, stated plainly:** he never puts the brush in his mouth in any sampled frame — there is no in-mouth beat in the evidence. Six stills cannot show where the cuts are, so whether this is one unbroken take or several is unknown. Whether the phone is handheld or propped cannot be told from stills; what is certain is that the vantage, room, distance and wardrobe are identical at every beat. The subtitles read like auto-generated speech captions from their lowercase, unpunctuated, clause-shaped phrasing, but there is no audio here to confirm that. The hoodie's chest logo is not legible. The third comment card is only partly readable.

## What carries the value

The stack of real comment screenshots pinned over the opening beat. They convert the whole runtime from a demo into a reply, and the persuasion is that strangers already asked. The product itself is never argued for — it is just operated, in hand, one step at a time.

## Shoot it

- **Camera:** one phone, front camera, held at arm's length. Chest-up. Set the distance once and do not change it for the whole video — no zoom, no pan, no second angle, no second room. When a detail needs to be seen, push the product toward the lens; never move the camera.
- **Frame:** stand so the upper half of the frame is empty and uncluttered. That empty space is where the comment screenshots go — if you fill it with your head, there is nowhere to paste them.
- **Light:** flat, bright, frontal — face a window or an open bright room. No lamps in shot, no coloured light, no grading.
- **Room:** a real interior with something ordinary behind you — a wall, a doorway, a mirror. Do not style it. Do not shoot in a studio.
- **Wardrobe:** one plain dark top, identical from first frame to last. No changes, since the whole point is that nothing varies except what is in your hands.
- **Hands:** the product lives in your hands the entire time. Assemble it, load it, turn it, present the alternatives. Both hands come up into frame.
- **Screenshots:** collect real comments off your own posts, screenshot them with the usernames visible, and composite two or three into the top of the opening beat, tilted and overlapping so they read as a pile rather than a graphic.
- **Captions:** burn in one clause per beat, centre-low, white with a shadow, same position every time. Do not put the ask on screen.
- **The ask:** goes in the post caption only — "Comment "{keyword}" and we will send you the link to {PRODUCT} with a surprise 🎁".

## Or generate it

```
vertical 9:16 photograph, {SUBJECT} at arm's length from a front-facing phone
camera, framed chest-up, standing in a plain interior — flat white wall, a
ceiling vent above, a mirror and an open doorway visible behind one shoulder —
wearing a plain dark hooded sweatshirt, holding {PRODUCT} raised beside their
face and angled toward the lens, flat bright frontal daylight, phone
front-camera look, slight grain, no retouching, no on-screen text, the upper
half of the frame left empty and uncluttered
```

**Motion:** camera fixed at one arm's-length vantage for the entire runtime — no zoom, no pan, no reframe and no second location; only the hands move, pushing {PRODUCT} toward the lens when a detail has to be read.

**Text overlay pattern:**

- Beat one only: two or three screenshotted real comment cards, slightly tilted and overlapping, composited into the empty upper half of the frame.
- Every beat: one clause of speech burned in centre-low, white with a drop shadow, identical position throughout — "{there's been hundreds of questions about {PRODUCT}}" → "{operating step 1}" → "{operating step 2}" → "{mechanism detail}" → "{compatibility question}" → "{closing claim, mid-sentence}".
- The gate never appears on screen. It lives in the post caption: "Comment "{keyword}" and we will send you the link to {PRODUCT} with a surprise 🎁".

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