# Addressed-callout monologue — rebuild sheet

A 26.7s piece to camera: an older man at his own home-office desk opens by naming his audience in red text — "This is a message to all finance bros" — talks straight down the lens across two setups, cuts once to cash in his hands, and closes with a second person joining him in frame over a "follow" prompt. 36,021,647 views · 2,715,761 likes · @thekumarmethod.

**Why it works.** The first line sorts the audience out loud — you either are a finance bro, know one, or have an opinion about one, and all three of those keep watching — so no hook trick is needed beyond naming a tribe. Everything after is credibility staging: his own desk, the map on the wall, the black knit, the locked camera, a single cutaway of money as the only prop, which makes the monologue read as a man who has something to say rather than someone performing content.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 2.14s | Locked waist-up frame at desk height. Man in a black turtleneck behind his desk, framed US map on the wall, shelf of photos, keyboard and desk phone across the bottom. Dim room, face the brightest thing in it. | This is a message to all finance bros |
| 6.41s | Second setup — same man on a brown leather couch against a plain, blown-out pale wall, hands clasped at his chin. Centred, seated eye level, wider. He reads nearly as a silhouette. | — |
| 10.69s | Back to the identical desk frame. Leaning in, palms pressed together, mid-sentence. | THE |
| 14.96s | Stacked frame: extreme close-up of his face over a close-up of hands fanning a stack of US $100 bills, dark desk below. | — |
| 19.24s | Frame is entirely white. | — |
| 23.51s | Same office, now bright and evenly lit. He is at the desk with hands folded, smiling; a woman stands behind him with a hand on his shoulder, both facing camera. | follow |

Three things the frames do not show, and I am not going to guess at them:
- **10.69s** — only the word **THE** is visible, in big red serif caps. It is clearly the front of a title card; the rest of the title is not in this still.
- **14.96s** — the face and the cash are stacked in one frame. From a still I cannot tell whether that is a split-screen, an inset, or a cut caught mid-transition.
- **19.24s** — this frame is pure white with nothing in it. Roughly a quarter of the runtime sits between it and the last beat, and none of it is recoverable from six stills.

Also: the post has **no caption**, and a contact sheet carries no audio. The script — the actual argument he makes — is not in this evidence. The maker writes their own.

**What carries the value.** The person and the address. An older man in his own office, naming a group in the first second and then talking straight down the lens. There is no demo, no collection, no transformation — one handful of $100 bills is the entire prop budget, and the warm two-person close is the payoff. This one does **not** replicate without talent: without someone who can hold a lens for 26 seconds and sound like they mean it, there is nothing here.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera.** Phone on a tripod, vertical, locked at desk height, waist-up — it never moves. Frame the subject behind their own desk with the desk furniture (keyboard, phone) intact across the bottom; the clutter is the credibility. Shoot the whole talk in that frame, then reshoot chunks of it in a second setup — the same person on a couch against a plain wall, camera centred at seated eye level, framed wider. Cutting between two static setups gives you cuts without ever moving the camera.
- **Wall.** Put one thing behind them that says who they are. Here it is a large framed map of the United States, plus a shelf of framed photographs. It should be legible in the wide and never explained.
- **Light.** Desk setup: dim room, warm practical lamps, the face the brightest object in frame — do not flatten it. Couch setup: let the pale wall behind blow out so the subject reads dark and close. Final beat: turn the room lights up and shoot it bright and even — the light change is what makes the ending feel like a different, warmer moment.
- **Wardrobe.** Plain black knit, no logo, no pattern, no print. Nothing that dates the video or pulls the eye off the face.
- **Cutaways — two, and only two.** One extreme close on the face (glasses, eye, cheek). One close on hands holding the thing the talk is about, shot dark against black clothing. That is the whole B-roll list.
- **The close.** Bring a second person into the same frame, standing behind the subject with a hand on their shoulder, both looking at camera, and put the CTA there. Two people in one warm frame is the sign-off.

**Or generate it**

The single beat worth generating is the opening desk frame — the callout beat is where this format lives or dies.

```
vertical 9:16 photograph, {SUBJECT} seated behind a home-office desk in a plain
black knit turtleneck, facing camera directly, framed from the waist up at desk
height, a computer keyboard and a desk phone across the bottom of the frame, a
large framed map of the United States on the wall behind and a shelf of framed
photographs to one side, black office chair, dim room lit by warm practical
lamps with the face the brightest thing in frame, phone-camera look, slight
grain, no retouching, no on-screen text, {PRODUCT} not in frame
```

**Motion:** camera locked at desk height and never moving — only the subject's head and hands move as they speak straight down the lens.

**Text overlay:** open on bold red sans with a drop shadow, three lines, lower-middle — `This is a message to {audience group}`. Close on a small yellow lowercase `follow` near the lower centre. Nothing in between except a title card in large red serif caps, of which only the first word is legible in this evidence.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZN5Njzo-Yh/
