# Subtitled monologue, angle cuts — rebuild sheet

A 78-second studio monologue: one man in a director's chair against black, an anatomy model parked beside him, talking through sinus symptoms and then the fix — 1,872,485 views, 53,672 likes, caption "Sinus signs and symptoms".

**Why it works**
Every caption card is a clause cut off before the thought closes — "and your ears, and", "Maybe you have leaky", "issue is actually a" — so there is never a frame where the sentence has landed and the viewer can leave. The set does none of the work and is not supposed to: the anatomy model just sits there lending clinical authority to words that would otherwise be a man talking.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 6.24s | Medium-wide, three-quarters on him in a wooden director's chair against pure black. Full-height red-and-white anatomical muscle/skeleton model on a stool at his right, sharing the frame. Podcast mic enters from the left edge. He points at his own forehead. | `1  Frontal Pressure` (big red numeral, white words) |
| 18.73s | Same set, same vantage, tighter. He touches his temple with his fingertips. | `and your ears, and` |
| 31.22s | Tightest framing on the sheet — head and shoulders, same vantage. Hand dropped low. | `The fix?` |
| 43.7s | Framing widens back out. He looks down, one hand raised open-palmed. A semi-transparent panel with a reddish graphic inside it is composited into the lower half of the *same* frame — an overlay, not a cut away. | Not legible in the still: only the letters "n" and "a" can be read, caught mid-fade. What the panel depicts cannot be read either. |
| 56.19s | Back to medium, same vantage. Open-hand gesture toward the lens. | `Maybe you have leaky` |
| 68.68s | Medium-close, him slightly left of centre, model larger at frame right. Identical wardrobe, chair, mic, backdrop, light. | `issue is actually a` |

Two things the frames do not show, and I am not going to guess at them: whether the framing changes are a second camera or punch-ins from one master (the vantage, set and light never change, so both are possible), and whether more numbered symptom stamps ran between 6.24s and 31.22s — only "1 Frontal Pressure" is in the sample, and by 31s the video has already turned to the fix.

**What carries the value**
The unfinished caption. Every card is mid-clause, so the argument is permanently one beat from landing. The anatomy model is the second-hardest working thing in the frame and it never moves — it is there to make the talk read as anatomy rather than opinion.

**Shoot it**
Phone on a tripod at seated eye height, three-quarters to the subject, never moved for the whole take. Black backdrop — a black sheet or a dark room with nothing lit behind — and one soft key from camera left so everything behind the subject falls off to black. Wardrobe: soft patterned casual shirt, nothing branded, nothing that flickers on camera. Put one authority prop in frame on the subject's side (here, an anatomy model on a stool) and leave it alone — it is set, not a demo. Let a boom mic sit in the edge of frame; it reads as "this was recorded, not made". Shoot one continuous take, then get your beat changes in the edit by punching in and back out on the same frame. Burn in speech captions in one fixed centre position, highlight the live words in a yellow block, and cut every card mid-clause.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 photograph, {SUBJECT} seated in a wooden director's chair against a
completely black backdrop, three-quarters to a camera at seated eye height, wearing a
soft blue-and-white plaid flannel shirt, glasses and a beaded wooden bracelet, one hand
raised pointing at their own temple, a full-height red-and-white anatomical
muscle-and-skeleton model standing on a wooden stool immediately to their right and
sharing the frame, {PRODUCT} not present in this beat, a large podcast microphone on a
boom entering from the left edge, one soft key light from camera left with hard falloff
so everything behind the subject goes black, clean studio look, slight grain, no
on-screen text
```

Motion: camera fixed at one three-quarter vantage for the entire runtime — the only change between beats is the scale of the framing (a punch in or back out), never a pan, an arc or a move to another side of the set.

Text overlay pattern: open on a stamp — a large red numeral `{n}` with `{Symptom}` in white beside it, lower left. Every beat after, one clause of the spoken line in a caption box at the same centre-frame position, live words in a yellow highlight block — `{…mid-sentence clause}` — always cut off before the thought closes. One short pivot card, `{The fix?}`, at the turn from the list into the mechanism.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DUN6PFJDrBA/
