Video Editing : Plan A: B-roll

Morgan Paar
June 2007

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If you are a documentary filmmaker, and this definitely includes you wedding videographers (yes, you are definitely documenting something), B-roll should be on your 'A list.' Collecting B-roll wouldn't hurt you narrative or fiction storytellers either, even if it's not in the storyboards.

"I don't remember him picking his nose during the shoot." If you have been an editor of interviews for some time, you know exactly what I'm talking about. When our video crew is understaffed, and the cameraperson is also the director, lighting person, audio person and continuity person, it is easy to miss a visual or audio gaffe during production. In post, you may need to edit out a sneeze, a clearing of one's throat or a sound that occurs off camera. When you run into this problem, who you gonna call? B-roll.

This is why B-roll is also called 'safety footage' or 'back-up footage.' It can save your project by covering a jump cut caused when you need to cut that sneeze or nose-mining segment out. B-roll can be preplanned as well, as it could be used, premeditatedly, to enhance your fiction or non-fiction story. If you are going to interview a group of factory workers for a documentary about a plant closure, you may plan and collect shots of the factory itself, maybe unemployment lines, working class neighborhoods, perhaps demonstrators and so forth. This is B-roll as well, but for this article, let's stick with B-roll as a Band-Aid to fix a "cut."

B-roll is the secondary footage collected to intercut with the primary footage. It is usually video only, as it is most often used over the A-roll audio, in place of the A-roll video. B-roll is usually shot at the same time the primary footage is collected.

You can collect B-roll at a time other than when you shoot your original footage, and you may need to if you forget to capture it on the shoot day, but then continuity needs to be considered. For example, if you shoot a segment of workers outside their factory on a sunny day and then return a week later to collect B-roll while it is raining, it's extremely likely that your footage won't cut together gracefully. If time allows, even if you are tired and ready for the end of the day, put in the extra half hour and collect a bunch of B-roll shots.

Certainly, collecting B-roll is not a very technical pursuit, but it is a discipline that must be learned and practiced. If you get in the habit of collecting B-roll on every shoot, it will become second nature, and you will always have a "box" full of B-roll Band-Aids for the lacerations that form in the edit.

Here are a few examples of common shooting problems and their possible B-roll solutions.

You are taping an elderly woman who lives in a retirement home for a documentary about American families. The 90-year-old woman keeps talking about her grandchildren, but they live 2,000 miles across the country. You just read an article in Videomaker about the need to collect B-roll, but you'll need to fill your gas tank about ten times for the round trip. The budget definitely won't permit that. What do you do?

Look over your right shoulder, up on the wall. Who do you think those three, individually photographed and framed kids are? Tape the pictures and shoot them in a couple of different ways. For example, tape a 'still' or a shot on a tripod without movement, maybe a fifteen-second shot to be safe, of each framed photo, and then shoot a 'still' of all three together. Then shoot a slow pan of each individually and then a pan of all three together. This will give you more options at the edit bay.