# Running caption over borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 46.3s motivational montage from douxds: sports footage of recognisable greats cut against portrait shots, with one narration broken into caption fragments running across all of it. 20,781 views, 357 likes. Caption: "for the goats".

**Why it works.** The line is never finished — every sampled beat lands mid-clause ("it's the" → "REFINING," → "to walk away from distractions." → "notices," → "it's about" → "for every man"), so there is no clean second to leave on. The borrowed footage supplies greatness the poster could never shoot, and because one sentence runs continuously over six unrelated sources, a pile of clips reads as a single argument.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 3.7s | Black frame, one rounded clip card centred: extreme close-up of a driver's eye through a racing helmet visor, cockpit dark, track blurred behind. Broadcast/film footage, not phone-shot. | it's the |
| 11.11s | Full-bleed dim indoor basketball court, cold blue light — backboard and hoop upper right, a lone figure mid-air at the rim, reflective floor below. | REFINING, |
| 18.52s | Rounded clip card on black again: chest-up on a bald track athlete in a blue-and-white GB vest under stadium light, visibly a TV broadcast frame. | to walk away from · **distractions.** |
| 25.93s | Full-bleed tight profile of a young man with bleached twists, bare shoulders, plain pale grey-green backdrop, soft even light. | notices, |
| 33.34s | Full-bleed football broadcast, telephoto across a green pitch: maroon #10 driving the ball, white #12 chasing. Low-res, zoomed in from a wider TV frame. | it's about |
| 40.74s | Narrow vertical clip card on black with side bars: a young man's face tilted up and away, bare shoulder, plain light wall. Phone-shot look. | for every · **man** |

Stated plainly: these are six stills across 46 seconds, so whatever lines ran between them are not in evidence and the sentence cannot be reconstructed in full. The stills also cannot show whether any camera moves, where the cuts fall, or what the audio is. No product appears in any sampled frame, and there is no brand mark, no talking head and no call to action at any of them.

**What carries the value.** The unfinished sentence. It is still open at the last sampled beat, and it is the only thing connecting six sources that share nothing else — the greats are just the pictures the sentence is spoken over.

**Shoot it**

- Camera: you barely shoot this one. Five of the six beats are sourced clips dropped in at whatever aspect they came in — landscape ones sit as a rounded card centred on black with empty black below for type, vertical ones fill the frame or sit as a narrow card with side bars. Do not re-crop everything to match; the mismatch is what makes it read as gathered rather than made.
- The one beat worth shooting yourself is the portrait (25.93s): tight profile, subject filling the frame, plain flat backdrop, soft even light, no room detail, no movement. A phone on a tripod near a window will do it — the reference frame is that simple.
- Light: take the sourced clips as they are, including the soft upscaled TV look. Only the portrait beats are lit, and they are lit flat and clean, which is the contrast that makes the broadcast frames read as archive.
- Wardrobe: bare shoulders on both portrait beats, no styling, no visible branding — nothing that dates or brands the shot. The sourced clips carry the kits and helmets.
- Text: one font, white, centre. Small clause per beat; on roughly every second beat drop one giant bold word beneath it. Same position every time.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 frame, pure black background, a single rounded-corner landscape
clip card centred in the upper two-thirds occupying about 70% of the width,
and inside that card a chest-up shot of {SUBJECT} mid-effort in their sport,
lit by hard overhead stadium light, telephoto compression, soft slightly
upscaled broadcast-television texture rather than a clean modern camera;
the lower third of the 9:16 frame left as empty black for type;
no on-screen text; no {PRODUCT} in frame — no product appears at any sampled
beat of the source, so do not add one
```

Motion: the clip card holds its position and never moves; only the footage inside it plays, at its own original speed, with no push, pan or scale change on the card itself.

Text overlay pattern: one narration cut into fragments, one per beat, never finishing a sentence — a small white clause set inside or just under the clip (`{small clause}`), and on roughly every second beat one giant bold white word dropped onto the black below it (`{HERO WORD}`), same font and same centre position every beat, the hero word always the emphasis word of that clause.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DEXwe0SMcsq/
