# Archive collage, claim cards — rebuild sheet

A 21.6s origin-story film for a mineral supplement, built entirely out of printed pages and old photographs with one product still in the middle — 414 views, 6 likes, so this is a structure worth borrowing, not a proven performer.

**Why it works**
The whole runtime is borrowed evidence: a monument being carved, a century-old halftone of a mine, a mountain printed into a page — none of it shot for this brand, all of it older than the brand, which is exactly what a new supplement cannot buy. The type never argues, it only labels what the documents already assert, so the viewer draws the conclusion themselves and the single clean product still lands as the thing that came out of all that ground.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 1.73s | A printed page fills the frame — matte sage paper, visible grain, a big dark circular shadow bleeding in from the left. Oversized black type across the middle running off the left edge, two columns of unreadable body text below, one word in gold over them | MINED / Not manufactured — / UNDERGROUND |
| 5.19s | Full-frame archival photograph in a green-grey duotone with vertical scan scratches: a colossal carved stone face in profile, a lone worker on ropes at the nose, forest falling away behind | SOUTH DAKOTA |
| 8.64s | Full-frame scan of a printed halftone illustration — dot screen visible — a mine headframe on a ridge, a tall shaft line running the full height of frame, strata layered beneath | touched (white lowercase, torn horizontally across the middle) |
| 12.1s | Studio product still: translucent bottle of cream capsules, white cap, centred on flat sage paper, one soft shadow to the right. The only words are on the label | none |
| 15.56s | A printed spread — oversized headline across the top scaled until both ends bleed off frame, two lines of illegible body text, a thin rule, and below it a full-width photograph of a jagged mountain range over an autumn plain, a dark animal shape at the bottom edge | UILT BY A MOUN (the line is "BUILT BY A MOUNTAIN", scaled so both ends run off frame) |
| 19.02s | Bare sage paper, nothing in frame but one small black sentence at mid-height | Mined, not manufactured. |

The on-screen lines track the post caption in order — underground, South Dakota, nobody's touched, a mountain built this, mined not manufactured — so the cards are a written script, one line per beat, bookended by the same claim.

**What carries the value**
The borrowed archival record. Old documents do the persuading; the type only names them. Note what is *not* here: no person, no hands, no demonstration, no before/after, no claim about what the product does to a body.

**Shoot it**
There is no camera work in the normal sense — five of the six beats are found material, one is a product still.

- **Source material:** two or three old photographs and one printed illustration of where the thing comes from, plus one modern landscape plate. They must look older than the brand — scan grain, halftone dots, scratches left in.
- **Grade:** everything, including the product still, pushed to one flat pale-sage tone. That single colour is what makes unrelated found images read as one film.
- **Camera:** if you shoot rather than composite, print the pages matte, lay them flat, and film square-on with the phone on a stand under soft window light — no direct sun, no gloss, no hand-held wobble. The frames show paper grain and a print vignette; they cannot tell us whether the original was really filmed off paper or is a digital paper texture, so either route is honest to the reference.
- **Product beat:** one bottle on a sheet of sage card, one soft light from the left, a single shadow to the right, nothing else in frame. It is the only clean modern image in the piece and it should stay that way.
- **Wardrobe:** none — nobody appears on camera at any point.
- **Type:** one line per beat. Two of them oversized until the first and last letters bleed off both edges; one accent word in gold; one word deliberately torn/glitched; the closing claim small and plain on bare paper.
- **Not shown by the frames:** whether there is a voiceover, whether the camera moves within any beat, and whether more text cards sit between the six sampled moments. Six stills cannot tell us any of that.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 photograph of a printed page shot flat and square-on: matte pale-sage paper with visible fibre grain and a soft dark vignette at the corners; across the upper third an oversized black sans-serif headline reading {HEADLINE}, scaled so wide that the first and last letters bleed off both edges of the frame; two lines of small deliberately illegible body text beneath it and a thin full-width horizontal rule under those; below the rule a full-width photograph of {SUBJECT} printed into the page in muted, slightly green-shifted colour, no gloss and no retouching; the whole frame graded to one flat sage tone with a faint print texture over everything, no other text and no logo
```

*Motion:* a very slow drift down the page, no zoom onto any element and no cut inside the beat, so it reads as a camera moving over a printed spread rather than a graphic being animated.

*Text-overlay pattern:* beat 1 — `{CLAIM} / Not {WHAT IT ISN'T} —` in oversized type running off the left edge, `{ORIGIN WORD}` in gold below it · beat 2 — `{PLACE}` in spaced white serif over the archival photo · beat 3 — `{ONE WORD FROM THE SCRIPT}` in lowercase white, torn horizontally · beat 4 — no text at all over the product · beat 5 — `{CLAIM RESTATED BIG}` scaled until both ends bleed off frame · beat 6 — `{CLAIM}, not {WHAT IT ISN'T}.` set small and black on bare paper.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DceT0ikKW5S/
