# Running caption over borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

An 89-second explainer that never shows its presenter a frame of her own: six full-frame clinical close-ups of diseased feet, none of them shot by her, held together by a rolling caption and a small cut-out of her pasted into the corner. 1,520,234 views · 13,148 likes · @dermguru.

**Why it works**

The caption is one continuous sentence chopped across the beats and cut off mid-clause every time, so there is never a clean place to stop watching. The pictures are borrowed clinical evidence the creator could never have shot — real, ugly, unretouched — and the pinned cut-out of her turns a pile of stock into one person's argument, which is what lets the last beat swap a diseased foot for a product bottle without the viewer feeling sold to.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 7.16s | Full-frame macro: a hand holds up a sole, skin flaking off in sheets, purple bedding behind. Presenter cut-out (dark hair, grey quarter-zip, lav mic) in the lower right. | **Athlete's foot 🦶** / *also known as athlete's feet* |
| 21.47s | Both soles held up to the lens, reddened and dry, grey carpet behind. Cut-out now centred and bigger, two fingers raised. | **Medical term: tinea pedis** / *that's how you can tell the difference* |
| 35.78s | Borrowed clinical macro, letterboxed: two hands spread toes apart to show the skin between them. A "MEDtube" watermark sits bottom right. Small cut-out mid-left. | **Tinea interdigitale 👇** / *this is not dry skin this is also fungus* |
| 50.09s | A foot on the white rim of a bath, big toenail thickened and yellowed. Cut-out centred over it. Term label is gone from here on. | *it can mean that this is also fungus* |
| 64.4s | A foot in a worn brown leather sandal on floor tile, big toenail crumbling and chalky. Cut-out on the right, larger. | *listen up cause this is crucial information* |
| 78.71s | White-background pack shot of an antifungal powder bottle, full frame. Cut-out pasted over its right edge. | *and sprinkling a little antifungal foot powder in your shoes every single day* |

The post caption carries the gate: *"Comment FOOT for the Amazon links to these products!"* — plural products, so the powder is not the only thing being pointed at.

**What carries the value**

The borrowed evidence. Six unretouched close-ups of real diseased feet, each named with its own term, escalating from flaking skin to a crumbling nail. The narration does one job only — reclassifying what the viewer assumed was dry skin as the thing they are looking at. The presenter proves nothing and demonstrates nothing; she is there so the pile of stock reads as one argument.

**What the frames do not show** — say this out loud rather than guess at it:
- Only 6 stills across 89 seconds. The cut rhythm between them is invisible; there may be many more shots than six.
- She is a cut-out in all six samples. Whether she is ever given the full frame, in between or at the end, cannot be read from these.
- The term label is on beats 1–3 and absent on 4–6. Whether it returns between samples is unknown.
- Nothing here shows where the clips came from or on what terms. One is watermarked MEDtube; the others are not attributed on screen.

**Shoot it**

You mostly do not shoot this — you source it. Budget your time on finding the evidence, not on the camera.

- **The evidence (five of six beats):** full-frame, phone-quality, real rooms — bedding, a bathtub rim, floor tile. Unretouched and unlit. The uglier and more ordinary the setting, the better it reads. Escalate: mildest instance first, worst instance last. Final beat swaps to a plain white-background pack shot of the product, which is the only clean frame in the piece.
- **Your own shoot is one setup:** presenter chest-up, locked phone frame, plain wall, flat even front light, clip-on lav mic. Deliver the whole narration in one take. Then crop or key it to a rectangle and paste it over the evidence.
- **Move the panel.** In this reference it is repositioned and resized on almost every beat — lower right, centred, small, large. It never sits still, and it never covers the part of the picture that is the proof.
- **Wardrobe:** one plain solid mid-tone top, hair down, no styling, visible lav mic. It should look like a professional filming herself once, not a shoot.
- **Text, two layers:** a white rounded box top-third naming the thing on screen, changing each early beat then dropping away; burned-in speech captions bottom-third, one clause a beat, always cut mid-sentence.
- **The gate goes in the post caption, not on screen** — a single word to comment for links.

**Or generate it**

```
vertical 9:16 photograph, full-frame unretouched macro close-up of the problem {PRODUCT} treats, shot on a phone in a real domestic room with the bedding or floor visible behind it, plain even indoor light, no styling and no retouching, slight grain — composited over it, a small rectangular cut-out of {SUBJECT} chest-up in a plain solid-colour quarter-zip with a clip-on lav mic, hair down, cut out from a flat evenly lit frame and pasted into the lower right of the picture, no on-screen text
```

*Motion:* no camera of its own — the borrowed full-frame clip plays with whatever camera it came with while the pasted cut-out of {SUBJECT} simply talks, and the cut-out is repositioned and resized between beats rather than held in one spot.

*Text overlay:* top third, black text in a white rounded box — `{name of the thing on screen} {emoji}` — changing to a new term on each of the first beats and dropping away once the evidence speaks for itself. Bottom third, burned-in rolling speech captions, one clause per beat, cut off mid-sentence — `{narration clause}`.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DRzbWl1jtWk/
