# Running-caption borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 71-second studio monologue that says your water bottle is poisoning you, cut against photos and renders the creator did not shoot. 6,173,227 views · 124,013 likes · @drewcanole.

**Why it works**

A man talking to camera is free to make a big claim, but it stays a claim — so every time the claim needs proof, the video leaves the room entirely and shows borrowed material: rash photos, upset kids, a labelled steel comparison, an anatomy render. The running caption never breaks across those cuts, so the monologue and the evidence read as one continuous argument and the viewer never registers that nothing was actually demonstrated.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 5.69s | Split screen. Top: presenter in a director's chair against black, boom mic in frame, holding the orange bottle up to camera. Bottom: full-bleed close-up of a baby's face with a red rash on the cheek. | "Your Stainless Steel Bottle Might Be POISONING You..." — white on an orange block, sitting on the seam |
| 17.07s | Full frame, same studio, medium-close, presenter tilting the bottle in his lap and talking. | "when it touches acidic liquids" |
| 28.46s | Leaves the studio: a plain white board with four blue-outlined tiles stacked down the frame — forearm rash, back rash, and two of the same girl scowling in a bedroom. | none |
| 39.84s | Full-frame generated render — a translucent child figure drinking from a metal bottle in a neon workshop, digestive tract glowing, metal beads travelling from mouth to gut. | "bodies every time they drink" |
| 51.22s | White board again, two tiles: a pile of steel slugs, a stack of steel sheets, each tagged with a bold navy label. | "18-8" above the top tile, "316" below the bottom one |
| 62.6s | Back to the studio, same crop, presenter mid-gesture with a hand raised. | "dealing with weird mystery" |

Read honestly: these are six stills across 71 seconds, so what happens between them is unknown. The orange headline card is there at 5.69s and gone by 17.07s — whether it holds for two seconds or fifteen, the frames don't say. The last 8.5 seconds are unsampled, so if there is a product plug or a call to action at the end, it isn't in evidence here. And the captions are fragments mid-sentence, which is what an auto-caption tool produces; the frames can't confirm the band never drops out.

**What carries the value**

The borrowed evidence stack. The rash photos and the labelled 18-8 / 316 comparison do all the persuading — they make an alarm claim look documented while the presenter never demonstrates anything. He holds the bottle; he never opens it, tests it, or shows a result. The proof is entirely material someone else made.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera.** One position, locked, chest height, subject seated and placed right of centre with headroom. Shoot the whole monologue in that one setup and get your variety from punch-in crops in the edit — the frames show a wider version and a tighter version of the identical framing, nothing else. A phone on a tripod covers this.
- **Light.** One soft key from camera-left, nothing on the background. The backdrop is black and stays black — every bit of falloff is doing work, so keep the subject well off the wall.
- **Wardrobe.** Plain single-colour t-shirt, no logo, no pattern. Glasses and a beard read as "explains things for a living"; the point is that nothing about the look competes with the caption.
- **The set dressing that matters.** A visible studio microphone on a boom. It is the only prop besides the bottle and it is what makes a man in a t-shirt read as a podcast rather than a selfie.
- **The cutaways.** Two treatments, both borrowed. Full-bleed when the image is the emotional hit (the rash, the render); tiled on a plain white board with thin blue rounded borders when you are stacking several images as a body of evidence. Labels sit outside the tile in bold navy, not on the image.
- **Captions.** Auto-captions, black block, centre-low, 4-5 words at a time, white with selected keywords in cyan. Same position and size over the studio and over the cutaways — the unbroken band is what stitches the two worlds together.

**Or generate it**

The hook beat — the split screen — is the one to generate:

```
vertical 9:16 split-screen still, hard horizontal seam across the middle.
Top half: {SUBJECT} seated in a wood-and-canvas director's chair against plain
black seamless backdrop, mid-sentence, plain light-blue crew-neck t-shirt,
clear-rimmed glasses, a large studio microphone on a black boom arm entering
frame from the left at chest height, holding {PRODUCT} up at chest level angled
toward camera, soft key light from camera-left falling off to black, clean
video-camera look, no styling in the background. Bottom half: a borrowed
full-bleed close-up of the affected area filling the frame, flat plain light,
unretouched, no props. No on-screen text.
```

**Motion:** camera locked on the studio half — only the presenter's own gestures move — and the bottom half is a still photograph held under it; no zoom, no push, no pan.

**Text overlay:** hook card on the seam, white bold on a solid orange block, two lines with one word in caps — `Your {EVERYDAY OBJECT} Might Be {HARM}ING You...`. Then for the rest of the runtime, spoken-word captions in a black block centre-low, 4-5 words at a time, white with the keyword words in cyan — `{words} {KEYWORD}`.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DUk8cm0DsMD/
