# Clause-chain mechanism demo — rebuild sheet

A follower's dare — "you HAVE to try the world's SMELLIEST cheese" — answered by running the test in the brand's own lab, narrated one unfinished clause at a time. 39s, 996,115 views, 28,901 likes.

**Why it works.** The comment sticker hands the video someone else's premise, so the brand is answering a challenge rather than making a claim — and the answer is physical: cheese goes into the liquid, a staffer swishes against a 30-second timer, and what comes back out into the tray has visibly stopped being cheese. Every caption is a fragment cut off mid-sentence, so the sentence is never finished on screen and there is no clean place to leave.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 3.13s | Lab bench. A gloved hand lowers a wedge of blue-veined cheese on a metal hook into an open glass jar of white liquid. A working lab is out of focus behind. | Comment sticker top-left: "Reply to Pia Marcett's comment — You HAVE to try the world's SMELLIEST cheese 🧀" · caption: "smelliest cheese?" |
| 9.38s | A man in glasses and a plain grey tee tips a small shot glass to his mouth. A phone screen is composited in showing a stopwatch at 00:30. | "will help it." |
| 15.63s | Blue-gloved hands hold a white tray of the expelled milky liquid, brown particles suspended in it, one finger pointing at them. | "that's not cheese." · small disclaimer "Use as directed - results may vary, staff results" |
| 21.88s | Product hero on the lab shelf: four amber dropper bottles with white caps flanking a silver bottle with a red cap. | "freshening" |
| 28.14s | A woman with braided hair in a striped shirt holds a clear cup of pale cloudy liquid above her eyeline, looking up at it. | Small label "Hismile Staff Testimonials" + the disclaimer. **The main caption at this moment is hidden behind her raised hand and cup — I can't read it, so I'm not going to guess at it.** |
| 34.39s | Extreme macro inside an open mouth — wet lower teeth, gums and tongue filling the frame. A red graphic edge intrudes at the right, too cropped to identify. | "like this," |

**What carries the value**

The tray. The milky liquid with brown particles broken loose in it, pointed at by a gloved finger under the words "that's not cheese." — residue produced on camera settles the dare in a way no sentence could. The lab (steel bench, nitrile gloves, reagent bottles, a stopwatch) is what makes the residue read as a test rather than a stunt; the two staffers are incidental — nobody performs, nobody addresses the lens.

Two things the frames do not show and I have not invented: whether there is a spoken voiceover under the captions (they read like transcribed speech, but audio is not in the sheet), and what happens between the sampled beats — the six stills are 6.25s apart, so there is certainly more footage than this in each gap.

**Shoot it**

- **Camera.** Phone, vertical, locked on a tripod or set flat on the bench for every beat. It never moves inside a shot and it never follows anyone — each beat is a new setup, cut hard. No handheld, no talking head, no second angle on the same thing.
- **Setups, in this order:** (1) bench-height lock on the jar with the offending object going in; (2) a person swishing, with a phone stopwatch either in shot on the bench or composited over the corner; (3) close, straight down on the tray of what came back out, a finger pointing at the evidence; (4) product hero on a shelf, flanked by lab glassware; (5) a person holding the used cup up to the light; (6) macro into a mouth — get the phone as close as it will focus, lit from the front.
- **Light.** Flat overhead strip light, clinical white balance, no warmth and no styling. Nothing here is lit prettily and it should not be.
- **Wardrobe.** Plain tees and everyday shirts, no uniforms, no branding on anyone. Blue nitrile gloves on every pair of hands that touches the test — the gloves are doing more work than the wardrobe is.
- **Casting.** Real staff, no performance. Nobody talks to camera, nobody reacts big. Two different people across the runtime is enough to make it read as a workplace rather than a creator.
- **Text.** One caption box, same grey style, same spot centre-low, every beat. Write your voiceover first, then cut it into clauses and put one clause per beat — every card must end mid-thought. Land the comment screenshot in the top-left on beat one only and never bring it back. Put the use-as-directed line under the box on any beat that shows a result.

**Or generate it**

The opening beat — the object going into the jar — is the one to generate; it is the hook that buys the rest.

```
vertical 9:16 photograph, stainless-steel laboratory bench filling the lower third, a blue-nitrile-gloved hand lowering {SUBJECT} on a thin metal hook into an open glass jar filled with {PRODUCT}, jar centred at bench height, a working lab of steel shelving, reagent bottles and equipment thrown out of focus behind, flat overhead strip lighting, clinical white balance, phone-camera look, slight grain, no retouching, no on-screen text
```

`{SUBJECT}` is the offending thing being tested — the equivalent of the cheese. `{PRODUCT}` is what it goes into.

**Motion:** camera locked at bench height, no zoom and no reframe — the only movement in frame is the gloved hand lowering `{SUBJECT}` into the jar until it breaks the surface.

**Text overlay pattern:** beat one only — a screenshotted comment sticker top-left, "Reply to {name}'s comment" / "{the dare, verbatim}", over a lowercase question caption "{the dare in two or three words}?" in a grey rounded box centre-low. From beat two the same box carries one mid-sentence clause of the narration per beat — "{clause}." → "{clause}." → "{clause}" → "{clause}," — and never completes a sentence. A small grey "{use-as-directed disclaimer}" sits under the box on any beat showing a result.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DT15_y2jUGt/
