How to film a prediction market skit

Before you roll: the line you don’t cross

A skit about someone betting their rent on a market is comedy, and the sillier the market the better. The line sits outside the video — in the caption, the pinned comment and the link in your bio. Presenting a take as a bet you really placed, to sell picks, fill a paid Discord, promote a giveaway or get viewers to stake money alongside you, is prohibited, and accounts that do it are closed. The market also has to survive being clipped: a believable price on a real election or a real person, cut loose from the sketch around it, is misinformation whatever the sketch meant. Invent the market, or make it absurd. The acceptable use policy has the full rules.

What the skit needs from the app

Most prediction-market skits run on three beats: someone finds a market, someone puts money on it, and the market turns. Pozer’s Polymarket-style prediction market can play the first two live, in the actor’s hand. The third happens between takes, because nothing on the screen moves by itself — there’s no market feed, so every chance, price and volume stays where you left it until you change it. Plan the turn as a cut.

If you still need a premise, start with the prank and parody ideas.

Step 1: Build the market for the scene

In the editor, write the event the scene is about and keep one or two others as set dressing; a single card looks thin in a wide shot. The generator guide walks through every field. For a skit, three matter most.

• Cash balance. It’s the pill at the top right, and it drops by the cost of every buy. Set it to what the character can afford — and keep each on-camera order inside it, because the app won’t refuse a bigger one. The cash stops at zero and the shares arrive anyway.
• The chance on the scene’s event. It’s the price the character buys at, in cents: at 72%, a Yes share costs 72¢.
• Your shares, Your side and Avg. price ¢, if the character already holds a position — the one they’re about to double down on, say. Leave Your shares at 0 on events they don’t hold, and those stay off the Portfolio.

Step 2: Put it on the phone

Press Create home-screen app. The panel shows the app’s link with a QR code, and scanning it with the phone you’ll film with is the quickest way across. On iPhone, open it in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. On Android, open it in Chrome, tap ⋮, then Install app. From then on, launch it from the home screen for every take: it opens fullscreen, with no address bar to crop out.

Step 3: Plan the takes

The app remembers. Every buy on camera is saved on that phone, so closing and reopening the app shows the lower cash and the new position, and the second take starts where the first one ended. That’s what you want when the story carries on into the next scene, and not what you want when you need the same moment twice. Before each take, decide which it is.

• To repeat a take, hold two fingers on the screen until Edit appears, tap it, then Reset to published values. The app reloads exactly as you published it.
• To set up the next scene — the turn — bring up Edit the same way, change the figure under Content (usually the chance on the event) and tap Save changes.
• Know what saving keeps. The Edit panel opens on what you published, not on the take, and saving makes that the app’s new starting point, so the take’s purchases are cleared. If a position bought on camera has to survive into the next scene, type it in before you save: Your shares, Your side and Avg. price on that market.

The Edit button only ever appears for you, and in the installed app it stays hidden while you film: two fingers held still on the screen bring it up for five seconds, and a single finger never does. On iPhone, the first time you do it, it asks for your email once — a home-screen app doesn’t share Safari’s sign-in. In a browser tab the button stays on screen, which is one more reason to film the installed app.

Step 4: Perform the buy

Tap Yes or No on the card. A sheet slides up headed Buy Yes or Buy No, with a keypad that counts shares rather than money: type 500 and it reads 500 sh. Tap the button at the bottom and the sheet becomes a receipt — a tick, the word Filled, +500 sh, and the cost and price underneath: ≈ $360.00 at 72¢ on the default Fed card. Below that it lists the Event, the Outcome, the Shares, the Avg. price, the Cost and To win, which is the share count in your currency, since each share pays one if it lands. The receipt doesn’t vanish on its own; it stays until someone taps Done or the dimmed screen above it, so hold on it as long as the edit needs.

A few things the app does that a take should know about:

• The receipt shortens the event to its first 22 characters: “Fed cuts rates in September?” prints as “Fed cuts rates in Sept…”. Put the words that matter at the front.
• A head-to-head card buys Yes on both sides. Tapping Down on the BTC card opens Buy Yes, and the receipt reads Down · Yes. That’s correct — backing Down is buying Yes on Down — but it means the character shouldn’t say they’re buying No.
• Each event holds one position. Buying more of the same side and outcome adds to it and blends the average price. Buying the other side, or another outcome on a list, replaces it, and the old shares go without any cash coming back. For a scene about hedging, use two events.
• There’s no sell button, and nothing resolves. The character can’t cash out on screen; that beat is a cut, or a line of dialogue.
• Some of the screen is set dressing. The row reading Trending, Combos, Breaking and New, the icons beside the search bar and the gift and bookmark icons on each card don’t respond. The chips, the search bar, the tabs and the Yes and No buttons all do.

Step 5: Cut to the payoff

The turn is an edit between takes: bring up Edit with two fingers, raise the chance on the outcome the character holds, save, and film the card again. Then tap Portfolio. Each position is valued at the current price, so its profit follows the new chance: 4,200 Yes shares on the default Fed card, bought at an average of 41¢, show +$1,302 at 72% and +$2,436 at 99%. Value and Return move with it. The one figure that won’t is the +8.4% today under the value, which you type yourself, so change Today % in the same edit if the day’s move should match.

For the losing ending, lower it instead. The same 4,200 shares at 20% show −$882 in red, and the dial on the home screen shrinks to a fifth of its arc.

On the day

• Turn on Do Not Disturb before the first take. A real notification sliding over a fake market breaks the scene, and it can show something private.
• Know where the mark sits. Free apps carry a SIMULATED · POZER.COM mark in every shot: across the portfolio value on the Portfolio tab, and about a third of the way down the markets feed. Pro, at US$12.99/mo, removes it.
• Record a clean pass of every tap — the Yes, the keypad, the receipt, the Portfolio — with nobody in frame. It gives the edit an insert for any take where a hand blocked the screen.
• Write down what each scene starts from: the cash, the chance and the position. With the Edit panel on the phone they’re quick to set, and easy to mix up.

End on the person, not the phone

Whatever the turn, finish on the character’s face. The last frame is the one that gets clipped, and a closing shot of a green Portfolio with no joke around it is the frame most likely to travel as something it isn’t. The reaction is the punchline anyway.