# Running caption over borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 96-second voiceover laid over basketball footage the creator did not shoot, subtitled one word at a time — 286,729 views, 15,158 likes, by littlebigliz.

**Why it works**

The caption only ever shows one word, so at no point in the runtime is there a finished sentence to leave on — the viewer is held by a line that is permanently mid-flight. Underneath it, borrowed broadcast footage does all the work the creator's own camera never could, and because the shots have no continuity with each other, the caption is the only thing making them read as one argument instead of a scrapbook.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 7.72s | Broadcast close-up of a young player in a white jersey, mouth open mid-word — punched in so far past the source resolution the picture is soft and smeared. Blurred blue arena behind. | DEFINITELY |
| 23.16s | Not live footage: a produced team graphic, re-filmed and fitted to vertical. A player in a black DETROIT 0 uniform holding a Detroit-branded ball, dark backdrop with a city street-map pattern and red angular shapes, a glowing halo added above his head. The rectangular graphic sits letterboxed over a blurred blow-up of itself. | NICER |
| 38.59s | Broadcast close-up of an NBA referee — grey striped shirt, NBA logo, Emirates patch, mic at his chest mid-announcement. Same heavy punch-in crop. | EVERYONE |
| 54.03s | Sideline game action: a player in a white road uniform (number 11) running across the court, a coach in a dark jacket at frame left, full crowd behind. | A ONE |
| 69.47s | Action under the basket — a player in a dark 28 jersey contesting a shooter at frame right, ball in the air, a referee numbered 11 in the foreground, a big yellow-on-blue LED board reading "…AVERS" behind the backboard. | AN |
| 84.9s | Broadcast close-up of a player in a navy jersey with orange and blue trim, mouth open reacting, blurred crowd behind. Same crop as the opening beat. | PLAYERS |

The words in order across the six samples read: DEFINITELY / NICER / EVERYONE / A ONE / AN / PLAYERS. These are six samples of a 96-second video, so the sentence between them is not visible here.

**What carries the value**

The always-unfinished caption plus borrowed authority. Nothing is demonstrated, nobody performs, and no claim is completed on screen — the persuasion is the voice running under footage that already looks expensive.

**What the frames do not show — do not fill these in**

- **No creator anywhere.** No talking head, no pinned reaction panel, no cut-out. In the library card for this format a small presenter panel usually stays in frame; there is none in any of the six frames here. Whether she appears somewhere between the samples cannot be told from this sheet.
- **No product, no brand, no call to action** in any frame.
- **No audio.** The voiceover is only readable through the subtitles, so what is actually being said — and where the joke in the post caption ("i don't think i described him right 🤷‍♀️") lands — is not evidenced here.
- All six sources are third-party (broadcast footage and a team graphic). Rebuilding this means sourcing your own footage — the swipe does not tell you how these were cleared.

**Shoot it**

There is nothing to shoot. This is an edit, not a shoot, and that is the whole appeal of the format:

- **Camera:** none of your own. Every beat is a source you did not shoot, cropped to vertical by punching in hard — the softness and the blocky edges are not a defect here, they read as "caught off television" and are part of why it doesn't look like an ad.
- **Cuts:** one source per beat, hard cut, no transitions and no attempt to match shots. Continuity between beats would weaken it.
- **Light and wardrobe:** whatever the source came with. Do not grade the beats to match each other.
- **The one thing you record:** the voiceover, on a phone. Then auto-caption it and set the subtitles to one word at a time.
- **Text:** white all-caps, centred, at the same height in every single beat. Never two words on screen at once except where the phrase demands it ("A ONE"). Never a full sentence.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 television frame-grab look, extreme punch-in close-up of {SUBJECT} wearing {PRODUCT}, head and shoulders filling the frame, mouth open mid-word, enlarged far past the source resolution so edges are soft and slightly smeared, out-of-focus crowd and cool overhead venue light behind, broadcast-camera colour, no on-screen text
```

*Motion:* the shot has no camera of its own — it is a long-lens source frame digitally pushed in and held, drifting only as the original camera drifted, then cutting to a completely unrelated source on the next word.

*Text overlay:* one word or two-word chunk per beat, white all-caps, centred at the same height every time, dropped in sync with the voiceover — `{WORD}` → `{WORD}` → `{WORD}` — with no beat ever showing a finished sentence.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DTBHxHgj0aF/
