# Caption-narrated time jump — rebuild sheet

A partner narrates her husband's skin fix in four caption cards while he uses one device on his own face across a few sessions, ending on a "2 months later" frame — 1,276,089 views, 1,240 likes, 14.67s, by glowtech.me.

**Why it works** — Someone else telling the story ("my husband") makes it a report rather than a pitch, and the worst-looking version of the face is handed over in the first second, so the viewer has a before-state to measure against for the whole runtime. The caption cards do nothing but date the gap between that face and the last one, which means the persuasion never has to make a claim the footage can be checked against.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 1.17s | Outdoors, conifers behind. Close handheld from slightly above on a middle-aged man in a black polo — forehead red and deeply creased. A hand comes in from the top-left holding a small wooden-handled hand tool and rests it against his forehead. | My husband started aging overnight…😭 |
| 3.52s | Indoors, window light from the left. Three-quarter close, black t-shirt, drawing a white ultrasonic scrubber up his jaw, metal head flat on the skin. Skin texture and marks left visible. | Tried an ultrasonic scrubber on his deep lines |
| 5.87s | Same unbroken take, lightly reframed — the scrubber has moved further up the cheek toward the temple. | Tried an ultrasonic scrubber on his deep lines |
| 8.22s | Hard cut to extreme macro. The forehead fills the frame — deep creases, reddened skin — with the scrubber head pressed between the brows and his eyes at the bottom edge looking into the lens. | Saw the results and got obsessed! 😮 |
| 10.56s | A separate session: white polo, different indoor light, plain wall. Medium-close, head tilted, working the scrubber along the jaw and chin. | Saw the results and got obsessed! 😮 |
| 12.91s | A third room — patterned wall panel, lit TV to the right. Maroon Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt, hand at his temple, facing the lens. Forehead crease and redness gone, skin smooth and light. | 2 months later…🔥 |

Four cards across six beats — each one is held across more than one beat, always centre-low, bold white with a dark outline. They are complete statements in sequence, not one sentence being fed out a clause at a time.

**What the frames do not show.** What the wooden-handled tool in the first beat actually is, or what it is meant to be doing, is never revealed. The two-month gap is a claim in a caption, not something the footage evidences. Whether the final face is smoother because of elapsed time, different lighting or a smoothing filter cannot be told from stills. And there is no audio judgement here — whether the caption lines are also spoken is unverified.

**What carries the value**

His own untreated face. The red, deeply creased forehead is given away early and then pushed to full-frame macro, so the last frame has something specific to be different from. The device is used on camera but never explained, and nothing is labelled — the two states of one man's skin are the entire argument.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera:** phone, handheld, arm's length, front camera. Deliberately no consistency — every chapter gets a different distance and a different room: one outdoors, one indoor three-quarter, one extreme macro on the problem area, one more indoor session, one final room. Reframe freely mid-shot; there is no locked frame anywhere in this video.
- **The macro is the shot to get right.** Get close enough that the problem area fills the frame with the device head touching it and the eyes just in shot at the bottom edge. That is the frame the ending is measured against.
- **Light:** whatever the room has. Daylight outdoors, a window to one side indoors, plain overhead light for the last beat. Nothing is lit, nothing is bounced.
- **Wardrobe:** change it every chapter — black polo, black tee, white polo, maroon tee. That is what makes separate sessions read as separate days rather than one shoot cut up.
- **Skin:** no retouching, no smoothing, no makeup on the early beats. Marks, redness and texture staying visible is the whole reason the last frame lands.
- **Performance:** none required. No dialogue, no acting, no piece to camera — one person using a device on their own face. This needs a real before-state and a genuine gap in time far more than it needs a performer.

**Or generate it**

The macro beat (8.22s) — the only frame that holds the problem and the product at full size in one image.

```
vertical 9:16 extreme close-up photograph, {SUBJECT}'s forehead filling the frame,
deep horizontal and vertical creases and reddened weathered skin clearly visible,
no retouching and no smoothing, {PRODUCT} held by their own fingers entering from
the top of frame with its flat head resting against the skin between the brows,
their eyes just visible at the bottom edge looking into the lens, plain indoor room
light with a soft window source, phone front-camera look, slight grain,
no on-screen text
```

**Motion:** handheld at arm's length, holding the macro on the forehead while only the head of {PRODUCT} drags slowly across the creases — no cut inside the beat and no reframe away from the problem.

**Text overlay:** four held cards, bold white with a dark outline, centre-low, same position every time, one per chapter of the timeline. Hold each across several beats rather than changing on every cut.

1. `My {relation} started {problem} overnight…😭`
2. `Tried {PRODUCT} on his {problem area}`
3. `Saw the results and got obsessed! 😮`
4. `{elapsed time} later…🔥`

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DcE383yMQoR/
