# Everyone brings one — rebuild sheet

A workplace potluck where the staff take turns holding their own dish up to the camera, then the host's own smoked brisket gets the hero treatment back at his house — 9,965,637 views, 952,322 likes (a 9.6% like rate), caption in full: "Potluck party".

**Why it works.** Each beat hands the camera to a different real person presenting something they personally made, so the video keeps buying attention with a new face and a new object instead of one performer's charisma. Nothing is styled, captioned or lit for camera, so the abundance reads as a real event you're being let into rather than an ad — and the one genuinely impressive dish is held back to the end as the payoff.

## The beats

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 7.63s | Close on a stainless slow cooker on a white counter, still sealed under cling film, packed with browned dumpling-shaped pieces over greens. A second slow cooker behind it. No people. | none |
| 22.9s | Office break room — exposed ductwork, strip fluorescents, white partition walls. A woman in a cream blouse and jeans holds an orange pot of mashed potatoes, lifts the lid off toward the lens, talking to camera. Folding tables of food at the edge of frame. | none |
| 38.16s | Same room, new presenter: a man in a black work polo with an embroidered company logo and grey work trousers, talking straight to camera. Wall TV and seated coworkers behind him. | none |
| 53.43s | Hard cut to a different location — a domestic kitchen, empty. Dark cabinets, a wooden KITCHEN sign over the window, white marble-look island across the bottom of frame. Camera at counter height, wide, steady. | none |
| 68.7s | Tight top-down: hands slicing a peppercorn-crusted smoked brisket on a white board, three slices fanned out showing the pink smoke ring. | none |
| 83.96s | The same kitchen from close to the same spot: a man in a black balaclava and dark t-shirt behind the island, arm mid-movement. | none |

**Where the frames don't show it:** there is no on-screen text in any of the six sampled frames, but six stills across 95 seconds cannot rule out text in the gaps — treat "no overlays" as the pattern, not as proven for every second. The only words visible anywhere are in-world signage: the embroidered logo on the polo at 38.16s and the KITCHEN wall sign at 53.43s. I also can't hear the audio, so what any presenter actually says is unknown — and stills can't tell me whether the camera moves *within* a beat, only how it's placed at the sample. Two presenters is all the evidence there is for a roll call; the beats in between may hold more people or may not.

## What carries the value

The roll call itself. Real, unstyled people taking turns to hold up the thing they made, in a room nobody dressed for camera — the number of genuine participants is the proof. The brisket close-up is not the mechanic; it's the reward for sitting through the roll call, and it only lands because everything before it was so plainly un-produced.

## Shoot it

**Camera.** Handheld phone, vertical, held at about chest height, subject standing at a comfortable talking distance — waist-up to full-body, not a tight face shot. One person per beat, framed alone, no cutaway to a listening crowd. Reframe between presenters rather than panning across them; the two office beats here are separate setups in the same room. For the second location, put the camera down at counter height and shoot wide across the counter — the two kitchen beats come from close to the same spot, though they are not a locked tripod match, so a braced phone on the counter is enough.

**Light.** Whatever the room already has. The office beats are lit by bare overhead fluorescents, flat and slightly green; the kitchen beats by ceiling downlights and a blind-covered window. Add nothing. Correcting the light is how this format dies.

**Wardrobe.** What people actually wore to work that day — a plain blouse and jeans, a company polo and work trousers. No styling, no changing anyone. The one costumed element is a single character in a black balaclava at the end; if you use a persona, keep it to one person in one beat, not the whole cast.

**Room.** Do not tidy it. Folding tables, foil trays, mismatched containers, a TV on the wall, coworkers eating in the background — the clutter is the credential.

**Casting.** You need a real gathering of real people, but you do not need a performer. Nobody here does anything harder than hold a pot and talk for a few seconds. That's the trade: this format is cheap on talent and expensive on having an actual group of people to film.

## Or generate it

The beat worth generating is the roll-call presentation (22.9s) — it's the one that carries the format. `{PRODUCT}` and `{SUBJECT}` are placeholders; fill them from the brand, don't invent around them.

```
vertical 9:16 photograph, {SUBJECT} standing centre frame in an open-plan
office break area, holding {PRODUCT} at waist height and lifting its lid away
with the other hand, presenting it toward the lens and looking straight down
the barrel mid-speech, everyday unstyled clothes or a plain work polo, exposed
ceiling with silver ductwork and bare strip fluorescent tubes overhead, plain
white partition walls, dark wood-look vinyl floor, folding tables carrying
other dishes and bottles at the frame edge, flat overhead fluorescent light,
phone-camera look, slight grain, no retouching, no on-screen text
```

**Motion.** Handheld at roughly chest height, essentially still on the subject with natural hand drift, no zoom and no push — the only real movement in the beat is the lid coming up off `{PRODUCT}` toward the lens.

**Text overlay.** None. No overlay text appears in any sampled frame; the only words anywhere are the caption, a bare two-word event name: `{event name}`.

**A warning on generating this one.** What persuades here is that the people are real and the room is undressed. Generated presenters can reproduce the framing but not the thing doing the work, so if you generate it, generate the second location and the hero close-up and shoot the roll call for real.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ3AFgQRDjs/
