# Subtitled monologue, evidence cutaways — rebuild sheet

An 85-second doctor-persona piece: a man talks to camera from a clinical office desk with running speech captions, and cuts twice to his own close-up footage of a real underarm being treated. 103,964 views · 523 likes · @kskinbydavid.

**Why it works**

The caption is never a promise or a headline — it is two or three words of a sentence that is still running, so there is no clean place to leave, and the viewer keeps reading to close it. The office, the suit and the shelf of clinical books buy the authority; the gloved close-up on a real, unretouched, discoloured underarm is what actually gets believed, and the wardrobe change between the two makes the demo read as clinic footage rather than as part of the pitch.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 6.81s | Close handheld: plain blue tee, lavender nitrile gloves, holding up someone's bare arm. The underarm is dark and stubbled, filling the left of frame. His face is at the top of frame, looking down at it, talking. | `REMEDIES` |
| 20.44s | Wide at a white desk — navy suit, tie, office with a shelf of clinical textbooks and a citrus tree. Four things lined up facing camera: turmeric powder, lemon juice, raw honey, a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. | `SODA IN A` |
| 34.07s | Back to the close handheld, same tee and gloves. The underarm is now coated in a translucent yellow-brown paste; a gloved finger points into it. | `BRINGING IT BACK` |
| 47.7s | Chest-up at the desk, same office. One hand raised toward the lens mid-gesture, talking to camera. | `SKIN` |
| 61.32s | Same chest-up framing. A white round cotton pad held flat over his open palm, presented to the lens. | `SOOTHING` |
| 74.95s | Same chest-up framing. A pale-green jar held up beside his face, label turned to camera. | `I PUT THE` |

What the frames do not show: there is no audio here, so the full spoken sentence is unknown — the six caption fragments are not consecutive and do not join up. The number of cuts between sampled beats is unknown; the desk footage runs at two sizes (a wide at 20.44s, chest-up after), same seat and same background, but whether the camera moves within a beat cannot be told from stills. The jar's brand mark is not legible at this resolution — do not guess it. There is no before/after pair in the sampled frames: the underarm is shown untreated and then coated, never shown cleared. A faint `@gmnaicontent` watermark sits top-left in every frame, so this file has been through an aggregator; the caption also opens with "Ad…" and ends on an Amazon link.

**What carries the value**

The real underarm in gloved hands. The dark before-state and the remedy layered onto it are the only unfakeable thing on screen — the suit, the bookshelf and the four supermarket ingredients are credentialing built around it. Swap the body area and the ingredients and the piece still works; remove the body evidence and it is just a man talking.

**Shoot it**

Two setups, one phone, vertical.

- **Desk setup** — seated, square to camera, chest-up (and one wider size that includes the desk surface for the ingredient beat). Behind you: a shelf of real books and one plant, nothing styled. Soft frontal light, a window or one lamp off-camera front; no hard shadow on the face. Wardrobe: suit and tie, or whatever reads as the credential in your category. Same seat, same background, every desk beat.
- **Demo setup** — different wardrobe, deliberately: plain single-colour crew-neck tee and disposable gloves. Close handheld, held at the work's own level, reframing with your hands rather than sitting on a tripod. Bright, flat, even room light — no mood lighting on evidence. The problem area fills a third to a half of the frame, unretouched, hair and texture left in.
- **Wardrobe rule:** the change between the two setups is doing work. Authority clothes for talking, working clothes plus gloves for the demo. Do not shoot both in the same shirt.
- **Text:** burn the speech captions in as you cut — two or three words at a time, small black box centre-low, all caps, one key word yellow and the rest white. Same position every beat. Nothing is ever pinned and nothing repeats.

**Or generate it**

The beat worth generating is the treated-area close-up, because that is what carries the value.

```
vertical 9:16 close handheld photograph, {SUBJECT} in a plain blue crew-neck
t-shirt and lavender nitrile gloves, both gloved hands holding a raised bare
arm of another person, the underarm filling the left of frame with {PRODUCT}
spread across it as a translucent layer, one gloved fingertip pointing into it,
{SUBJECT}'s face at the very top of frame looking down at the area and
mid-speech, plain bright room with a wall chart out of focus behind, even flat
indoor light, phone-camera look, slight grain, no retouching of the skin, no
on-screen text
```

Motion: close handheld, camera drifting with the gloved hands and reframing to keep the treated area centred, no cut inside the beat.

Text overlay pattern: `{2-3 words of the spoken sentence}` — small black box centre-low, all caps, key word in yellow and the rest white, a new fragment every beat, never pinned and never repeated.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DaEH1dxSdlo/
