# Question card, borrowed answer — rebuild sheet

A quoted question lands over one selfie frame, then the whole rest of the video is somebody else's subtitled interview clip answering it — 33.27s, 1,192,642 views, 85,057 likes, by bigdogshaanfitness.

**Why it works**

The opening card asks the question the audience is already asking and then refuses to answer it in the poster's own voice — so the viewer stays for an answer that is coming from someone else, someone with more credibility than the poster could claim. Because the answer arrives as unstaged archive speech cut into mid-sentence fragments, there is never a finished thought to leave on, and nothing in it reads as written for the post.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 2.66s | Poster's own vertical frame, full-bleed: a man in a black durag with a white wireless earbud, plain dark top, in close profile facing frame-left, looking slightly up. Background is a flat pale blue-to-white gradient with no detail — the frames don't settle whether that's sky or a blown-out wall. | "How are you so confident that everything will work out?" |
| 7.98s | Hard cut to borrowed footage — a 16:9 clip letterboxed into the vertical frame, black bars top and bottom. A bearded man in dark plaid flannel over a tan tee and a gold chain, seated in a recording studio: mixing console with blue and green channel LEDs, rack gear behind, a red plastic cup on the console at his shoulder. Mid-speech, gesturing. | "you know there was" |
| 13.31s | Same clip, framing essentially unchanged. Head turned slightly right, still talking. | "I just made that switch" |
| 18.63s | Same framing, hand raised mid-gesture. | "you know till I decide to stop" |
| 23.95s | Same framing, head back toward camera, hand lowered. | "and this" |
| 29.28s | Same framing, hand up again, still mid-sentence with 4s of runtime left. | "so some some mornings you gotta wake up" |

Stated plainly, because the frames don't show it: the six stills can't tell whether the borrowed clip is one unbroken take or tight jump cuts on the same angle, and they can't tell whether the poster's own shot comes back in the last 4 seconds. The post's hashtags name Drake; the frames themselves only establish that the speaker is not the poster and the footage was not shot for this post. There is no product anywhere in any frame.

**What carries the value**

The borrowed speaker's own recorded words. The poster asks a question and then never answers it — the authority and the payoff both belong to footage he didn't shoot, and his single opening frame is only the thing that converts that clip into an answer.

**Shoot it**

You shoot one frame. Everything after it is a clip you find.

- **Camera:** phone, vertical, held close for a head-and-shoulders profile — subject turned to face frame-left, eyes slightly above the lens, not looking into it. One held frame, no push, no reframe.
- **Light:** flat and bright, from the front. The background in the reference is a featureless pale blue-white with no texture to read — shoot against open sky or a blown-out wall so nothing competes with the text.
- **Wardrobe:** plain dark top, nothing branded, nothing styled. Everyday headwear and an earbud are visible in the reference and read as unposed — leave that kind of detail in rather than cleaning it up.
- **The clip:** pick real archive footage of someone your audience already trusts, answering the question you posed. In the reference the subtitles are set in a different typeface from the question card, which suggests they came burned into the source clip rather than being added by the poster — so a clip that already carries its own captions is doing half the work. Keep it letterboxed; do not crop it to fill the frame. The black bars are what tell the viewer this came from somewhere else.
- **The cut:** one hard cut at roughly the 5-second mark, and you never come back. Drop the question card at the cut and leave it gone.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 close profile photograph of {SUBJECT} described exactly, head and shoulders,
facing frame-left and looking slightly up past the lens, plain dark top, a single white
wireless earbud visible, against a pale blue-to-white gradient background with no detail
in it, flat bright even daylight, phone-camera look, slight grain, no retouching, no
on-screen text; no branded object in this frame — if {PRODUCT} appears at all it belongs
in the borrowed-answer beats, not here
```

**Motion:** camera fixed at close profile distance, no push and no reframe — this beat is a single held frame that exists only to carry the question card before the hard cut.

**Text overlay pattern:**

- Beat 1 only — `"{the question your audience is actually asking}?"` in quotes, two lines, centred in the upper third, white sans with a soft shadow. Then it drops and never returns.
- Beats 2 onward — one clause of the borrowed speaker's speech per beat, centre-low over the letterboxed clip, each clause cut off mid-sentence: `{"you know there was"}` → `{"I just made that switch"}`.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DY5MFXCBcqp/
