# Personified mechanism explainer — rebuild sheet

A 53s hairline video where the problem is played by a cast of yellow cartoon blobs living on a real balding scalp — they infest it, climb the hair, get poured on, and die. 111,440 views · 1,275 likes · @realhealthschool · caption: "How to tackle reseeding hairline #health".

**Why it works**
The mechanism is cast as a villain you can see: characters that sit on the skin, spread, react to the product and then visibly stop moving, so cause and effect is watched rather than claimed. Because the camera keeps changing scale — macro on one follicle, then the whole crown — the infestation reads as everywhere, and the single word held on screen at each beat keeps the eye on the scalp instead of on a block of text.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 4.26s | Close on a bald crown tilted toward camera, the subject's eyes just in frame at the bottom; yellow blob characters with cartoon eyes and arms line the hairline. Blurred tiled bathroom behind. | FURTHER |
| 12.79s | Tighter on the receding hairline; amber-brown liquid pours from off the top of frame down the centre of the scalp, the characters flattening and running with it. | REVERSING |
| 21.32s | Extreme macro on a V of hair strands, characters clinging to the strands, one facing camera open-mouthed. | WHAT'S |
| 29.84s | Pulled back to the whole thinning crown from slightly above, a dozen characters spread across the scalp, a larger one grinning in the centre. | SPREADING |
| 38.37s | Same crown; a bare hand enters from the top of frame tipping a dark amber dropper bottle over it. The central character looks up, alarmed. | BRINGING |
| 46.9s | Macro back in: one large glossy character, arms folded, eyes wide, dead centre, the smaller ones slumped around it. | KILLED |

Where the frames don't tell us: there is no audio in the stills, so whether a voice is speaking those words is not established — but the words appear one at a time and don't form a sentence in sampled order, which is what a word-by-word subtitle track under a voiceover looks like. The bottle's label is not readable in any frame. There is no handle, watermark, logo or end card in any of the six frames, and no face beyond the eyes at 4.26s.

**What carries the value**
The characters. They are the whole persuasion: the problem is given a body that infests, reacts and dies on camera. Take them out and there is nothing left but a scalp and a bottle.

**Shoot it**
Shoot the plate, animate the cast on top — the plate is a phone job.

- Camera: phone, vertical, handheld but close and steady, held slightly above and in front of the head so the crown fills the frame. Change scale between beats — one extreme macro on a few hair strands, one wide on the whole crown, the rest in between. Never a talking head, never a second location.
- Light: soft even indoor light, the kind a bathroom window gives. No hard specular hits on the scalp — a shiny highlight fights the composited characters.
- Wardrobe/subject: irrelevant and invisible. Everything above the eyebrows, no shoulders, no clothing in frame. The subject only has to sit still.
- Room: a real tiled bathroom kept well out of focus. It must be recognisably domestic and never sharp.
- The product beat: bare hand entering from the top of frame, bottle tipped over the scalp, held long enough for the liquid to actually run.
- Text: one bold white all-caps word, centre-low, heavy black outline, one word on screen at a time.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 photoreal macro photograph of the top of {SUBJECT}'s balding scalp filling the frame, thinning hair around the edges, shot from slightly above and in front, head tilted toward the lens; a dozen glossy yellow blob characters with large cartoon eyes and small arms sit on the skin between the hairs, one larger character centred and looking upward; a bare hand enters from the top of frame tipping {PRODUCT} over the scalp; blurred tiled bathroom wall and shower fitting behind, soft even indoor daylight, shallow depth of field, photoreal skin with visible pores and stubble, cartoon characters composited into the real plate, no on-screen text
```

Motion: camera holds close on the scalp with only a slight drift while the hand and bottle enter from the top of frame; the characters are the only other movement, the central one turning up toward the bottle.

Text overlay pattern: one bold white all-caps word at a time, centre-low, heavy black outline, replaced beat by beat from the spoken line — `{WORD}` — never more than one word on screen at once.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/Db5geBfqDp9/
