# Running caption over borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 66.9s argument about why old bodies decline, built entirely from footage the poster did not shoot — a published study screenshot plus five park clips of elderly people doing elite calisthenics — with a one-word-per-beat narration running over the top. By zinsegrity, 11,414 views, 495 likes.

**Why it works**

The word track is always mid-sentence, so there is never a clean place to leave — you keep watching to finish a thought that never lands. And because the poster shot none of it, the video gets a peer-reviewed journal page and six unstageable bodies for free: the persuasion is entirely the gap between what the viewer assumes a 70-year-old can do and what is on screen.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 5.35s | Full-frame PubMed page: "Randomized Controlled Trial — Long-term Tai Chi practice in older adults is associated with 'younger' functional abilities, Yan Ma et al. Aging Cell, 2024 Jan.", abstract visible below. No camera of its own. | COMPARED |
| 16.06s | Park: bald older man in dark street clothes holding a front lever on a horizontal bar, people in red and blue jackets passing behind, paving, overcast daylight. Handheld, waist height. | ADULTS · pinned lower-third: "POV: the average grandparent in China" |
| 26.76s | Different plaza: older person in a loose black jacket inverted on their hands, legs folded overhead, an older man in green walking past. Low, near-ground camera. | CONSISTENT |
| 37.46s | Bamboo grove: man in dark jacket, cap and yellow shoes standing on paving, one arm reaching up to an overhead bar. Locked chest-height frame, full body. | NORMS |
| 48.17s | Same bamboo spot: person hanging fully inverted from the bar, feet hooked over it, body folded down. Same locked vantage. | STEEPER |
| 58.87s | Pond edge: shirtless man in red shorts in a handstand-planche on flat rocks, palm and banana leaves behind, water below. Warm daylight. | MOTIVATIONAL |

**What carries the value**

Old bodies doing what the viewer believes old bodies cannot do — validated in the first five seconds by a real journal page, before any clip has had to earn belief on its own. The words never argue; they just keep the sentence open while the footage does the work.

**What the frames do not show**

- **No presenter anywhere in the six stills.** This format normally pins a small talking-head panel in frame so the narrator never leaves; there is none here. One could appear between the sampled beats — the stills cannot rule it out.
- **No product, no brand, no logo, no CTA in any frame.** Nothing to injection-swap; a product beat would have to be added, not substituted.
- **No credit, watermark or source stamp** on any borrowed clip, so where the footage came from or on what terms is not visible.
- **Stills cannot confirm a voiceover.** The one-word-per-beat text is consistent with a spoken narration being auto-captioned, but the audio track is not evidence I have.
- **Whether frames 4 and 5 are the same continuous clip** (same bamboo location, same vantage) or two separate cuts is not determinable from two stills 10.7s apart.

**Shoot it**

You do not shoot most of this — that is the format. What you actually build:

- **The opening authority beat.** A clean full-screen capture of a real published source on the claim, held static, filling the frame. Screen-record it; do not photograph a monitor.
- **The five evidence beats.** Sourced clips of real people doing the thing, each visibly from a different place. Rules that make it read as evidence rather than as an ad: plain everyday clothes, never sportswear; ordinary members of the public in the background, not a cleared set; flat natural daylight; the phone's own handheld wobble left in; no colour grade, no music-video framing. If you shoot them yourself, shoot each one in a genuinely different location on a different day — shared backgrounds kill it.
- **Camera:** vertical, phone, waist-to-chest height, whole body in frame. Never move the camera inside a beat and never cut inside a beat.
- **Cut on the word.** Hard cut, no transitions, roughly every 10s at this runtime.
- **Text:** heavy bold white all-caps with a dark outline, dead centre, identical position every beat, one word at a time. One pinned "POV:" line on the first footage beat only.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 candid outdoor photograph, {SUBJECT} in plain dark everyday
clothes — not sportswear — holding a full-body horizontal-bar hold in a
public park, body off the ground and straight, ordinary members of the
public in coats moving in the background, paving stones underfoot, bare
trees and park railings behind, flat overcast daylight, handheld
phone-camera look at roughly waist height, slight grain, no retouching,
no on-screen text — no {PRODUCT} anywhere in this beat: the source frames
contain no product at all, so an injected {PRODUCT} belongs in an added
beat of its own, never composited into this one
```

**Motion:** no camera of its own — play the beat as a found clip, full-frame, with whatever handheld movement it came with; no push, no reframe, no cut inside the beat.

**Text overlay pattern:** one word of a continuous narration per beat, heavy bold white all-caps with a dark outline, centred in the identical position every beat, never completing a sentence — `{WORD}` → `{WORD}` → `{WORD}`. Plus one pinned lower-third premise landed on the first footage beat: `POV: the average {SUBJECT} in {PLACE}`.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZfgK70tGgN/
