# Wordless scene, borrowed inserts — rebuild sheet

A 14.23s handheld phone clip of three friends daping each other up on an outdoor athletic track, cut twice against borrowed still images that restate the same handshake as a cartoon and then as two glowing aliens. 450,803 views · 32,680 likes (7.2% like rate) · @wockkingdaggerr.

**Why it works**

The live footage never escalates on its own — three men do an ordinary greeting — so all the escalation is manufactured in the cut, by images the creator did not have to shoot or perform. Because there is no text and nobody addresses the camera, the viewer has to read the inserts as the joke, and doing that reading is what holds them to the end.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 1.14s | Handheld close inside the group on an outdoor track: two men in plain athletic wear facing each other, a third man's back in a blue tee cutting across the foreground. Overcast daylight, red track, school building behind. | none |
| 3.42s | Hard cut to a borrowed still, full frame width and letterboxed with black above and below: a flat cartoon drawing of several men, one bald figure in front with a hand raised toward another. | none |
| 5.69s | Back on the track, same framing and same light — one man reaching a hand onto the other's shoulder. | none |
| 7.97s | Wider: three men on the track, two clasped in a hand grip with heads bowed together, the third alongside. Maroon shorts, an "ATHLETICS" tee. | none |
| 10.25s | Second borrowed still, letterboxed the same way: a rendered image of two grey aliens leaning together, hands clasped, a bright halo between them on a purple cosmic field. | none |
| 12.52s | Tight handheld on the two men's clasped hands raised overhead in a dap, arms filling the frame, faces mostly out of shot. | none |

**What carries the value**

The two inserts. They take the exact gesture happening in the live footage and re-render it one register higher each time — cartoon, then cosmic — so an ordinary handshake reads as an event. Nothing is said, nothing is written, and nothing the people do changes; the cut does all of it.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera:** one phone, handheld, held *inside* the group at head height rather than observing from outside — bodies cross the foreground and that is fine, it is what makes it read as caught. Vertical. Let the framing wander between a close two-shot, a step-back wide of all three, and a tight shot on the hands. No tripod, no stabiliser, no zoom.
- **Light:** none brought. Shot outdoors in flat overcast daylight. Any open outdoor location with sky works; do not shoot this indoors under mixed light — the plainness of the live footage is what makes the inserts land.
- **Wardrobe:** whatever the people already own. The frames show plain tees, a gold chain, athletic shorts. Nothing matching, nothing styled, no brand-facing wardrobe.
- **Text:** none, anywhere, at any point. The post caption does the only naming — a shout plus the collaborators tagged, then hashtags.
- **The edit is the format:** shoot one continuous physical bit, then cut a full-width letterboxed still in at roughly the quarter and three-quarter marks. Each insert holds for a beat and cuts straight back to the live take. Each insert must show the *same gesture* as the shot it interrupts, or the joke has nothing to attach to.
- **You need two people willing to do one physical action.** You do not need a performer — nobody speaks to camera, nobody delivers a line, and faces are incidental (the last beat is mostly arms).
- **Not visible in the frames:** whether there is dialogue or a music bed under this, and where the two inserted images came from (whether they were found or made). Six stills also cannot rule out text appearing between the sample points — but none of the six carries any, and the format only works if there is none.

**Or generate it**

The insert is the beat worth generating — the live half is a phone and two friends. This prompt makes the second, higher-register insert:

```
vertical 9:16 frame, letterboxed with black bars above and below so the image
reads as a full-width insert cut into a phone video, a rendered otherworldly
restatement of {SUBJECT}'s gesture with {PRODUCT} — two figures mirroring that
exact gesture, glossy digital-art rendering against a deep purple cosmic field,
a bright halo of light between them, high saturation, deliberately not
photographic, no on-screen text
```

*Motion:* the insert is a still held motionless for its whole beat — no push, no drift, no parallax — cutting in hard against the handheld live footage and cutting straight back out.

*Text overlay:* none. This format carries zero on-screen text at any beat; the only words live in the post caption, in the shape `{SHOUT}! @{COLLABORATOR} @{COLLABORATOR}` followed by hashtags.

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