# Found-still caption escalation — rebuild sheet

A 47-second scroll of borrowed corporate stock photos, each one held still with a fake caption bolted on, the captions getting worse and worse — 7,469,757 views, 488,050 likes, captioned only "What a strange place".

**Why it works**
Every image is instantly recognisable as generic stock — flat white background, over-lit smiling stranger, visible iStock and Getty watermarks — so the viewer's brain files it as bland before the caption lands on top of it, and the whole joke is that collision. The captions climb a ladder rather than repeating, from a mundane work-anniversary line to an obscene one, so each beat is a bet on how far the next one goes.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 3.76s | Stock photo: middle-aged man, white shirt and blue tie, glasses, both fists raised cheering at a desk. A grey pixelated bar runs across the middle over something unreadable; blurred colour at the bottom edge is not legible in the still. | I'm celebrating 2 years at Doodoo Dynamics |
| 11.28s | Black-and-white stock photo: young man in a dark shirt and jeans holding an open laptop, smiling at camera, plain white background, black letterbox bars top and bottom. | Here's what the US winning gold can teach us about closing deals |
| 18.8s | Stock photo: man in a navy suit leaning both hands on a white desk, plain white background, iStock watermark "Credit: GlobalStock". A black bar with a gold sparkle effect sits across his midsection — **whatever text is inside that bar is not legible in this frame.** | We're hiring! (on-site $42K salary) |
| 26.32s | A small stock image inset in a black frame: a crowd of people jumping, arms raised, against white radial speed lines. Getty Images watermark "Credit: skynesher". | Join Premium and we'll tell you who viewed your profile! |
| 33.84s | Stock photo: bearded young man in a black suit adjusting heavy black glasses, iStock watermark at the right edge. Below him, a flat corporate-illustration graphic of cartoon figures celebrating around a giant cupcake. | Excited to share I've been promoted to senior butt licker |
| 41.36s | Motion-blurred stock photo: balding man in a dark suit bent forward mid-dance on a plain white background. Caption set huge in black on the right half. | IM BRICKED UP FOR BUSINESS |

Two honest gaps. The stills are sampled every 7.5 seconds, so **the real cut rate is almost certainly faster than six beats** — there are likely more images between these that the sheet does not show. And there is no audio evidence here at all: whether this runs over music, a voiceover or silence cannot be told from frames.

**What carries the value**
The gap between a borrowed, bland corporate stock photo and the caption bolted onto it — and the ladder that gap climbs beat by beat. Not the images (they are deliberately worthless), not any presenter (there isn't one). The escalation is the retention device.

**Shoot it**
Strictly, there is nothing to shoot — every frame here is a found image, which is why one person can make this in an afternoon with no camera and no talent. If you want originals that read the same way, match the stock look exactly: plain white seamless backdrop, flat frontal light with no shadows, subject isolated dead-centre or leaning into frame, generic business wardrobe (dark suit, white shirt, tie; or plain shirt and jeans), a big unearned smile, slightly over-exposed and over-saturated. One static frame per beat, camera locked, no movement, hard cuts. Keep the frames visually inconsistent with each other — different people, different crops, some black-and-white, some letterboxed — because the mismatch is part of the read.

Text rules: white sans-serif for the ordinary beats, centred low over the subject, one to three lines. Then break the pattern once at the end — the punchline goes black, all-caps, roughly three times the size of everything before it. Do not clean up the watermarks; the visible iStock and Getty credits are what tell the viewer these are borrowed.

**Or generate it**

The punchline beat (41.36s) is the one that has to be right:

```
vertical 9:16 generic corporate stock photograph, {SUBJECT} in a dark business
suit, white shirt and tie, caught mid-motion bent forward in an unflattering
pose with motion blur across the arms and torso, {PRODUCT} in frame beside
them, isolated on a plain seamless white studio background, flat even frontal
commercial lighting with no shadows, slightly over-lit and over-saturated,
dated stock-library look, no on-screen text
```

Note: the source frame has no product in it at all — `{PRODUCT}` is the injection slot for a brand rebuild, not something the original had.

*Motion:* no camera move at all — the still is held and cut hard in and out; the only movement in frame is the motion blur already baked into the photograph.

*Text overlay:* one fabricated caption per still, all in the same borrowed platform voice, escalating across the beats — `{mundane work claim}` → `{corporate brag}` → `{absurd claim}` — with the final beat set in giant all-caps as `{PUNCHLINE IN CAPS}`.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DVJXsB-DsTE/
