# Pinned tease, archive montage — rebuild sheet

A 61-second post by `sportsculture` that pins one unexplained accusation over a minute of borrowed archive footage of a famous athlete — 1,607,694 views, 132,696 likes.

**Why it works**

One line accuses an unnamed "she" of doing something to a named person, and nothing on screen ever says who she is or what she did — not the footage, not the speech subtitles, not the post caption, which talks only about the man being misunderstood. The viewer stays for a payoff that is deliberately withheld, and the borrowed archive underneath supplies a minute of familiar face and emotional highlights to fill the wait.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 4.89s | Borrowed interview clip, letterboxed: a man in a maroon tee, gold chain and watch, seated on a pale grey couch holding a handheld mic mid-word; another person's leg at the left edge; plain wall washed purple behind, soft frontal key, fixed camera | `She did Kyrie dirty.. 💔` + `"She's An Incredible"` |
| 14.66s | A visibly different source: near-black frame, a man in a black high-necked top lit by one hard edge light, out-of-focus night lights behind. **The still cannot confirm whether this is the same man as the first beat** | `She did Kyrie dirty.. 💔` + `"When RnB Artist"` |
| 24.44s | **This frame does not resolve** — a very dark, badly out-of-focus close shot with a pale smear at the upper left. No subject, room or camera position can honestly be named from it | `She did Kyrie dirty.. 💔` |
| 34.21s | Borrowed broadcast basketball footage, graded hard red with a glow bloom: a player in a white Cavaliers #2 jersey driving at the rim past a Warriors defender, full arena behind | `She did Kyrie dirty.. 💔` |
| 43.98s | Same red grade, new clip: two players in wine Cavaliers jerseys embracing on court, one seen from behind wearing #23, a teammate in yellow warm-ups at the left | `She did Kyrie dirty.. 💔` |
| 53.76s | Same red grade: the #2 player under the backboard at the rim, an official and another player at frame right | `She did Kyrie dirty.. 💔` |

The pinned line is word-for-word identical in all six frames, in the same position, in the black band above the picture. The quoted speech subtitles appear only on the two interview beats and are gone for the whole back half.

**What carries the value**

The unanswered accusation. The line is the entire mechanic: it names a victim, withholds the culprit, ends in an ellipsis and is never completed anywhere in the piece. The archive footage is not evidence for it — it is just something to look at while the question stays open, which is why the resolution ends up happening in the comments rather than in the video.

**Shoot it**

You do not shoot this — that is the point of the format, and it is why it is cheap. Everything on screen is someone else's footage. What you assemble:

- **Sources:** three or more visibly different clips of the same subject, and let them look different — a lit interview, a dark low-key clip, broadcast or event footage. No attempt to match grade or camera between them. Cut hard.
- **Order:** talking clips first (they set the story), wordless action or emotional footage second. The back half carries no speech text at all.
- **Grade:** the back half is pushed hard red with a glow bloom, which is what makes a run of unrelated clips read as one edit. Apply it to the montage only, not to the opening interview.
- **Frame:** letterbox the borrowed picture with a black band top and bottom, and put the pinned line in the top band so it never sits over the image.
- **Wardrobe, light, room:** not yours to control — inherited from whatever you borrowed.
- **If you do want to shoot a piece of it:** the only shootable beat is the opening interview — a fixed camera slightly below eye line, a person seated on a plain couch with a handheld mic, one soft frontal key and a coloured wash on the wall behind. Nothing handheld, nothing moving.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 letterboxed interview still — black bands top and bottom, the picture occupying the middle band: {SUBJECT} seated on a pale grey couch on a small talk-show or podcast set, wearing a plain maroon crew-neck t-shirt with a thin gold chain and a gold wristwatch, holding a wired handheld microphone up to their mouth mid-word, body angled slightly off-axis to the lens, another person's leg just inside the left edge of frame; behind them a plain wall washed purple by a set light, soft frontal key from a little below eye line, broadcast video look with mild noise, no on-screen text; no product appears in the source — if one is required, {PRODUCT} rests on the couch arm just inside frame
```

*Motion:* no camera of your own — a fixed borrowed interview camera holds the medium shot with almost no movement while the subject talks, and the edit cuts away to a differently-graded second source rather than moving.

*Text overlay:* one line pinned in the black band above the picture for the entire runtime, word-for-word identical at every beat, trailing off and never completed — `{Someone} did {SUBJECT} dirty.. 💔`. Under it, on the interview beats only, a quoted speech subtitle in white cut off mid-sentence — `"{fragment of what they are saying}"` — dropped entirely once the montage starts.

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