Day 3. Copied a viral trick one to one and missed

I took a trending trick: two shots alternate so fast that the eye cannot assemble the picture and watches to the end. I broke the reference down frame by frame and captured the exact pattern: 59 shots in 6 seconds, 2 to 4 frames each. I assembled my own reel on the same pattern, frame for frame.

The mistake was that I copied the mechanic and did not copy the point. In the reference the flicker is held by a face: the viewer catches the gaze and stays. In mine half the shots were the sea, the cover came out grey, and there was no text at all. A beautiful trick with no reason to watch.

The takeaway, which is also a new working rule: copying a trend's mechanic is fine and necessary, but before assembling you must say in words what exactly holds the viewer in the original. If the answer is "the face and the gaze", then the face must flicker, not the landscape.