B-roll

B-roll is usually shot by the camera operator alone while the rest of the crew packs up. Hands, a machine turning, a corridor, the logo on the wall, someone laughing over coffee. A good operator shoots it with the edit in mind, not as a company photo album. It comes at the end of the shoot day and gets used a hundred times, because it covers every stumble in an interview.

On a corporate video for a manufacturer the owner corrected himself three times. The rough cut had three visible jumps. We covered them with B-roll from the production line and nobody notices a thing. Without it the only option is a reshoot: another day, another crew, another invoice, easily the price of the whole edit.

The maths is simple. Count three to five minutes of usable B-roll for every minute of finished video, so roughly an hour of filming for a two minute piece. From you we need access and a clear yes or no on what can be in frame. The rest is the operator knowing what the editor will need later.

The mistake we see most often: B-roll shot with no plan, just in case. You end up with two hundred frames of an empty corridor and not one detail of the product. The other thing studios overdo is slow motion on everything. A slow motion coffee machine is not a story, it is filler.

Before we leave a location we walk through the storyboard out loud and name what is still missing. Five minutes, and it is the cheapest insurance on a shoot day we know of. Ask for it yourself: before the crew packs the kit, ask whether there is B-roll for every sentence the video will say.