# Subtitled monologue, evidence cutaways — rebuild sheet

A guy in a hoodie stands in a shop aisle, reads two competitors' ingredient panels out loud in macro, then holds up the one he uses — 46.2s, 831,506 views, 20,107 likes, by imjustwasim.

**Why it works** — He never makes a claim of his own; he reads the manufacturers' own printing back to you in a macro shot you can read along with, so the indictment comes from the packaging rather than from him. The hero product is then shot in the identical grammar — same hand, same aisle, same full-frame panel — so the viewer completes the comparison themselves instead of being told the verdict.

## The beats

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 3.7s | Arm's-length chest-up on the speaker in a retail oral-care aisle, dark grey hoodie, talking to the lens, shelves of mouthwash behind | "Breath Smells Like Butt? Best Mouthwash at Walmart" |
| 11.1s | Cutaway: full-frame macro of a hand holding a clear purple mouthwash bottle turned to its back panel, the whole inactive-ingredients list legible; aisle floor at the bottom edge | "Look, propylene glycol, palaxomar 407," |
| 18.49s | Back to the same chest-up aisle frame, now holding a bottle of pink mouthwash up beside his face | "And those colors are derived from petroleum" |
| 25.89s | Cutaway: same macro grammar, a cardboard carton's back panel — ingredient block, phone number, "made in the USA", leaping-bunny mark | "It's got polysorbate eighty, artificial sweeteners, polaximer four07," |
| 33.29s | A hand holds the endorsed product front-on in the aisle — teal-and-white oral rinse carton, no face in frame | "This is what I use at home" |
| 40.68s | Cutaway: the hero carton's own back panel in the identical macro — a named-oils ingredient list under "DAILY AYURVEDIC REGIMEN" | "They use real peppermint oil, real spearmint oil" |

The two ingredient misspellings ("palaxomar 407", "polaximer four07") are what is actually burned into the frames — auto-captions left uncorrected. Caption styling is not consistent: beats 2–4 are white with a dark outline, beats 5–6 sit in a solid black box, and beat 1 is a larger bold hook card. Six stills cannot show whether the camera moves inside a beat, whether there are further cuts between the sampled moments, or whether he is holding the phone himself — none of that is visible in the frames.

## What carries the value

The printed panels. He wrote none of the words doing the persuading — the villain ingredients and the hero ingredients are both the manufacturers' own copy, held still enough to read. Shooting all three panels the same way is the whole mechanic: the comparison is between two pieces of somebody else's printing, so there is nothing to disbelieve.

## Shoot it

- **Camera** — a phone, handheld, two setups only. Setup A: arm's length, chest-up, subject centred with product shelving filling the background. Setup B: the same hand at arm's length holding a package so its back panel fills the whole frame, shot in the same aisle so the floor edge shows. Nothing is locked off, no tripod, no second angle.
- **Light** — whatever is overhead in the shop. Flat fluorescent, no fill, no daylight. Do not light it; the store light is the credential.
- **Wardrobe** — plain and unstyled: a dark zip hoodie, no branding, nothing that reads as produced. He looks like a shopper, which is the point.
- **Getting the panels readable is the whole shoot.** Hold the package flat to the lens, let autofocus settle, and give each panel a beat longer than feels natural. If a line of the ingredient list is not readable on a phone screen, that cutaway is dead.
- **Order** — hook to camera → villain panel → back to camera with the villain product in hand → second villain panel → hero product held front-on → hero panel. Two villains before the hero; the hero never gets a claim, only its own label.
- **Captions** — burn in what he actually says, one clause per beat, breaking mid-sentence on a comma so no beat ends on a full stop.

## Or generate it

The beat worth generating is the evidence macro — it is what carries the piece.

```
vertical 9:16 macro photograph, one bare hand holding {PRODUCT} turned so its
printed back panel fills the entire frame and every line of the ingredient
block is legible, shot at arm's length inside a retail aisle with the shop
floor just visible at the bottom edge, flat overhead fluorescent store light,
no face and no body in frame, phone-camera look, slight grain, no retouching,
no on-screen text
```

**Motion** — handheld at arm's length, the hand making small correcting moves to keep the panel flat and readable to the lens; no push, no pan, no rack focus, the panel filling the frame for the whole beat.

**Text overlay** — rolling speech-clause captions, one per beat, centre-low, white with a heavy dark outline, each cut off mid-sentence on a comma:

`"Look, {ingredient}, {ingredient},"` → `"And those {attribute} are derived from {source}"` → `"This is what I use at home"` → `"They use real {ingredient}, real {ingredient}"`

Beat one is the exception — a larger two-line bold hook card instead of a caption: `"{blunt problem question} / {category superlative} at {retailer}"`.

A generated panel will not survive being read. Whatever is on the label has to be real, so shoot the macro beats for real even if the aisle and the speaker are generated.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DTk0mLBjbBU/
