# Running caption over borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 108-second explainer where the presenter appears on his own camera exactly once, at the top, and spends the rest of the runtime as a cut-out pinned in the corner of a black frame filled with material he didn't shoot. 1,231,991 views · 54,026 likes · @drkaranrajan · caption "Kiwi for sleep".

**Why it works** — Every claim arrives as somebody else's document: a real product label, a published nutrition panel, a labelled chart, a medical cross-section, so the presenter never has to prove anything on camera, he only has to stand next to it. The narration is cut into fragments that are each a piece of one sentence rather than a finished statement, so there is no clean beat at which the viewer has heard the end of the thought and can leave.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 8.63s | Handheld close on his own hands turning a supplement bottle so the blue Supplement Facts panel faces the lens, thumb on the dose rows. Plain beige wall, doorway behind, ordinary indoor light. The cut-out of him is already pinned at the right edge. | `1 gummy has 0.5 mg of melatonin` |
| 25.88s | Black frame. Two borrowed stills float on it — a wall clock reading about ten past one, and a stock photo of a woman asleep on a pillow. Cut-out lower right, hand raised. | `for four` |
| 43.13s | Black frame. A two-bar chart, bars in bright blue, labelled **Melatonin** and **Serotonin**, rising behind a stock render of three kiwis with one cut open. | `serotonin` |
| 60.38s | Black frame. A white document card headed **Nutritional Information** — a bulleted list per 100g with three rows struck through in yellow highlighter (Energy: 61 kcal · Potassium: 312 mg · Dietary Fibre: 3g). | `calories.` |
| 77.64s | Black frame. A medical illustration of a stomach in cross-section, gastric fluid pooled at the bottom, coloured molecule diagrams suspended in it. | `faster` |
| 94.89s | Black frame. A studio stock photo of two wooden bowls of pale fibre powder, wooden spoon laid across one. | `measures.` |

**What carries the value** — The stack of borrowed authority graphics. Not one of them was produced by the creator, and none of them is argued with; they are simply shown while the narration walks past. The face in the corner is what licenses them — it turns four unrelated found images into one person's argument.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera** — Two setups only. One handheld phone close on your own hands holding the product with the label turned to the lens, in whatever room you're in. Then one locked front-camera plate: chest-up, talking to the lens, hands free to gesture, shot flat against a wall so the background cuts out cleanly. That plate is the entire rest of the shoot.
- **The composite** — Black background. Borrowed source fills the upper two thirds, your cut-out sits lower right, same size and same position on every single beat. It never moves, never scales, never gets cut to full frame.
- **Light** — Flat and even from the front on the plate, so the edge cuts out without a halo. The opening handheld beat is plain indoor light and should look worse than the plate — that's fine, it reads as real.
- **Wardrobe** — Plain crew-neck t-shirt, clip-on lapel mic visible at the collar. Worth knowing: in this video the cut-out wears a grey-blue top in the opening beat and an olive t-shirt in all five later beats, so the plate and the product footage were plainly shot on different days. The format does not need them to match — you can shoot one plate and reuse it against any set of sources.
- **Text** — One narration fragment per beat, white bold sans, centred and sitting low across the top edge of your cut-out, identical size and position every time. Fragments, not headlines: nothing gets pinned, nothing makes a promise.
- **Sourcing** — This is a sourcing job more than a shooting job. Five found images carry the whole video: a real product label, a published data panel, a labelled chart, an anatomical illustration, an ingredient still. Clear whatever you use — the original creator's rights position on these images isn't visible in the frames and isn't inherited by a rebuild.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 composite on a pure black background: the upper two thirds is a
borrowed authority graphic — a plain white document card of published
specification or nutrition data for {PRODUCT}, black body text in a bulleted
list with three rows struck through in yellow highlighter, sitting flat on the
black with a hard rectangular edge; lower right, a cut-out of {SUBJECT}
chest-up in a plain crew-neck t-shirt with a clip-on lapel mic at the collar,
hands mid-gesture toward the lens, lit flat and evenly from the front,
background cleanly removed so the cut-out sits directly on black;
phone-camera look and slight grain on the cut-out only, no retouching,
no on-screen text
```

*Motion* — The cut-out plate is locked and never moves or changes size between beats; the borrowed graphic above it has no camera move of its own and simply swaps to the next source on the cut.

*Text overlay* — `{fragment}` → `{fragment}` → `{fragment}` → `{fragment}`, one per beat, each a piece of one continuous spoken sentence. The opening beat instead carries a flat stated fact over your own footage: `{unit} has {dose} of {ingredient}`.

**What the frames don't show** — Six stills across 108 seconds is all the evidence there is here, so: what happens between the sampled beats is unknown, including how many further sources are used and whether the presenter ever returns to full frame. The last 13 seconds after 94.89s are not sampled, so there is no evidence of a CTA or a close. The narration is inferred only from the burned-in fragments — there is no audio in this read, so the sentence they belong to is not known. Two of the six fragments end on a full stop rather than trailing off, so the fragments are subtitle chunks of continuous speech, not a deliberately unfinished line. And one honest caveat on the rebuild: the source presenter is a doctor, and some of the licence these borrowed graphics get comes from that credential. The structure transfers to any presenter; the credential does not.

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