Cross Out

Cross out the advice, then name the thing it was standing in for. A headline sits on a card; two marker strokes cross it out, hold, and are wiped back off the way they came — and as they go the two words drift apart and the card grows to hold them. Hard cut to black, and the real sentence builds a word at a time over a dashed diagram. The marker is geometry, not a picture: a measured centreline, a width that swells and tapers along it, and an edge that is seeded value noise, so drawing on and wiping off are the same operation — ask for the polygon of an arclength range — rather than a dash offset, which cannot taper and cannot chop an end. The card is not animated at all: solved back out of the recording its left edge sits 52.7px left of the headline's first glyph on all 25 frames of the first beat, ±0.2, while its top never moves, so it is width: max-content around a line whose word gap runs 19px to 76 and everything you see it do is the text doing it. The headline's baseline is not a table either — it climbs 4.5px while the type grows 1.7%, and the two are one event about a pivot 90px below the frame, which is also what stops a growing line from walking off its own baseline.