# Dated archive playback, hard cut to now — rebuild sheet

A man plays a four-year-old video of himself back inside his phone's photo library, screen-recorded with the date stamp left visible, under one pinned headline — then hard-cuts to himself today, full frame, no text. 40.22s, by it.is.joao · 1,619,431 views · 103,140 likes · post caption is empty.

**Why it works**

The proof isn't the creator's word, it's the operating system's: the app's own date pill reads "July 3, 2022 · 3:00PM" and the scrub bar and filmstrip are left in shot, so the age of the old footage is stamped by the phone rather than claimed by the person. The headline "At 24 vs at 28" tells you what the gap is measured in and then never says another word about it — the second half simply stops labelling and lets the present-day version stand there as the answer.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 3.22s | Screen recording of a phone photo library playing an old video. App chrome all left visible: date pill "July 3, 2022 / 3:00PM", back chevron, "..." menu, pause button, scrub bar, thumbnail filmstrip, share/heart/info/adjust/trash row. The old video is a small letterboxed panel centred in frame — younger man, longer dark hair, plain black tee, driver's seat of a parked car, front-camera selfie, daylight through the windscreen. | **At 24 vs at 28** |
| 9.65s | Same playback, same panel, unchanged framing. He's mid-sentence. A small white speech subtitle appears below the panel. | **At 24 vs at 28** / $9,000 in debt and you miss |
| 16.09s | Same unbroken playback. Only the subtitle line changes. | **At 24 vs at 28** / wondering like what the hell. |
| 22.52s | Same unbroken playback — the phone's status clock has ticked 11:43 → 11:44, which proves act one runs continuously with no cuts. Subtitle changes again. | **At 24 vs at 28** / now I literally would be |
| 28.96s | Hard cut out of the screen recording. Full frame, no phone interface, no headline, no subtitle: present-day man, short dark hair, mustard-yellow hoodie with a dark box logo, chest-up selfie in a bright high-rise apartment — floor-to-ceiling windows, glass tower and skyline behind, big green plant to his right, shelving left. Flat daylight. | — |
| 35.39s | Tighter full-frame selfie, still no text. Same man in a red t-shirt, in a car — red leather seat edge right, dark headliner top-left. Face fills the frame, mid-word. | — |

The speech subtitles are fragments — none of the three completes a sentence, each is cut mid-clause. That's the retention device inside act one.

**What carries the value**

The date stamp on the old file. Everything else is scaffolding around it: because the archive is played back inside the photo app rather than cut in as footage, the viewer sees the timestamp, the scrub bar and the filmstrip and reads the old clip as a document instead of a shot. The headline supplies the units; the present-day cut supplies the other end. Nothing is demonstrated and nothing is argued.

**Shoot it**

- **Act one is not filmed — it's screen-recorded.** Open the genuinely old video in your phone's photo library, press play, and screen-record the whole playback. Do not crop the interface out and do not trim the date pill: the chrome *is* the evidence. Let it run unbroken — this one holds for over 22 seconds without a cut.
- **The archive has to be real and has to be you.** This is the one part that can't be cast, staged or generated. Without a true dated file the format has nothing doing the persuading.
- **Headline:** white rounded box, bold black text, top third, sitting in the black interface area above the video panel. Pin it word-for-word for the whole of act one; never animate it, never change it.
- **Subtitles:** small white text in the black area *below* the panel, one clause per beat, each one cut off mid-sentence. Subtitle the old video's speech only.
- **Act two: phone front camera, arm's length, your own real spaces.** The frames show a daylit apartment beside floor-to-ceiling windows and then a car interior — no set, no lights, window light only. Framing goes chest-up, then tighter to face-filling.
- **Wardrobe:** act two changes clothes between the two locations (mustard hoodie, then red tee), which reads as separate days rather than one sitting. The frames can't tell us whether that was deliberate.
- **Zero text in act two.** The moment the archive stops, the labelling stops.

**Or generate it**

The beat worth generating is act one's inner panel — the old clip. The phone interface, the headline and the subtitles are composited around it in the edit, not generated.

```
vertical 9:16 screen recording of a phone photo library playing an old video: flat
black interface filling the frame, the app's own date pill and menu row across the
top and a scrub bar, thumbnail filmstrip and action-icon row across the bottom, with
a small letterboxed video panel centred in the middle — inside that panel, {SUBJECT}
at a visibly younger age sitting in the driver's seat of a parked car, front-camera
selfie, plain dark t-shirt, longer hair, daylight through the windscreen and side
window, other parked cars visible outside, low-resolution older phone-camera look
with visible compression and no retouching; no authored on-screen text
```

*Motion:* there is no camera in this beat — it's a screen recording, so the phone interface stays absolutely fixed and the only movement is the old video playing inside its small panel and the scrub bar creeping across. Hold it unbroken rather than cutting.

*Text overlay:* act one carries `At {STATE_THEN} vs at {STATE_NOW}` in a white rounded box, top third, over the black area above the panel — pinned unchanged for the whole act; plus small white speech subtitles below the panel, `{clause}…`, one per beat, each cut mid-sentence. Act two carries no text at all.

**What the frames do not show**

- No audio was available. The three subtitle lines are the only evidence of what is said, and they are fragments.
- The stills cannot confirm the man in the last two frames is the same person as the one in the archive panel — the hair and build differ, which is consistent with the headline's claim but is not proof of it.
- Only six stills across 40.22s: there may be further cuts between sampled beats, the headline may reappear somewhere unsampled, and it can't be told whether act two is one take or two.
- No product appears in any frame. If a brand is being injected, the frames give no evidence of where it would sit.
- The post caption is empty, so it carries nothing.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DXSES41kRpO/
