# Running caption, borrowed cutaways — rebuild sheet

A 31.9s nostalgia montage cut entirely from borrowed footage — skate games, a console keynote, open-world game scenes — with one sentence running across it a fragment at a time. Posted by lucamaxiim, caption "white boy summer 2026". 1,586,406 views · 147,918 likes.

**Why it works**
The sentence is never finished on screen, so leaving early means leaving mid-thought — the read, not the footage, is the retention device. The footage underneath is all borrowed and instantly recognisable, so recognition supplies the feeling for free while the caption supplies the reason to keep watching.

**The beats**

| Time | What happens | On-screen text |
|---|---|---|
| 2.55s | Game shot from behind and low: a figure in a blue hoodie and jeans skating up a concrete quarter pipe, red brick building, overcast sky | they used |
| 7.65s | Dark stage, a man in a blue suit beside a white podium, a giant XBOX ONE screen behind him, seated audience at left | were nerfed |
| 12.75s | Wide game shot of a concrete skate plaza, wooden ramps, several skaters at different depths, blue sky — a different game look from the opener | summers |
| 17.85s | Game interior: garage or storeroom with an old fridge, boxes, a worn couch. A man in a blue hoodie kneels on the floor, head back, chugging something | 25 |
| 22.95s | Game shop with green shelving and lit screens. A bald man in a grey tee holds a Linkin Park "Meteora" album cover flat to the lens at chest height | rock |
| 28.05s | Golden-hour plaza with statues and columns; four men in black-and-white tracksuits playing guitars and singing on the road | Elite Ball Knowledge |

Where the frames don't show something, plainly: the stills are sampled every 5.1s, so the fragments between these six are not visible — the full sentence cannot be recovered from the contact sheet. There is no audio in the sheet, so the music or voiceover is unknown. Whether the camera moves inside each borrowed clip can't be told from stills. And "Elite Ball Knowledge" appears only in the final sampled frame — it reads as a sign-off card, but whether it also sits on earlier frames is not visible here.

**What carries the value**
The unfinished sentence. One fragment per beat, completing only at the end, laid over footage the viewer already recognises. No product, no demonstration, no face doing the persuading — the pull is entirely "how does this sentence end".

**Shoot it**
No performer and no set needed — this is an edit, not a shoot. The build is: pick a run of six to twelve clips a viewer will recognise on sight, all from a world you can point at (game capture, archive, product-launch footage, your own old library); write one sentence and break it into that many fragments; put one fragment on each clip. Rules that make it read:

- **Never repeat a source back to back.** Every sampled beat here is a different scene and, twice over, a different game entirely. The variety is what stops it feeling like a clip reel.
- **Cut on a steady beat.** These land roughly every few seconds, evenly. No clip outstays its fragment.
- **One text style throughout** — white bold sans, centred low, no punctuation, same size every beat. The words must read as one continuous sentence, so nothing about the type may change.
- **Fragments are short.** One to two words each on the beats we can see. The sentence has to survive being read in pieces.
- **Save the name for the last frame.** The only branded text lands at the end, big, in a corner, over the biggest-looking shot in the video.
- If you shoot rather than borrow: keep every frame flat and plain — chest-height, static, ordinary interior light, no styling. The footage is a backdrop; the sentence is the act.

**Or generate it**

Image prompt for the beat that matters most to a brand — the one where an object is held flat to the lens with a caption word over it:

```
vertical 9:16 frame in a mid-2000s open-world console-game render look,
{SUBJECT} standing facing camera in a cluttered shop interior with green
metal shelving and small lit screens behind, holding {PRODUCT} flat to the
lens at chest height so it fills the middle of the frame, plain grey t-shirt
and jeans, flat even interior game lighting, slightly soft low-polygon
textures, no on-screen text
```

Motion: camera locked at chest height on the held object, no push or pan — the object is presented flat to the lens and held still for the length of one caption fragment.

Text overlay pattern: one fragment of a single running sentence per beat, white bold sans, centred low, no punctuation, the sentence completing only on the final beat — `"{fragment 1}"` → `"{fragment 2}"` → `"{fragment 3}"` → … → `"{final fragment}"`, with `"{account or brand name}"` as a large card in a corner of the last frame.

**Reference:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DVZDBVLCe-6/
