Impulse

Before shoot­ing RAAM, a sea­soned doc­u­men­tar­ian told me, “shoot plenty of B-roll”. Man, they weren’t kid­ding. While edit­ing RAAM, I’m find­ing that I need way more estab­lish­ing shots & B-roll. Establishing shots are wide shots that show you where you are: main street in a tiny desert town, etc. It’s a type shot called “B-roll”. B-roll shots also include other lit­tle details that are handy in visu­ally describ­ing the set­ting or event: a sign show­ing the city’s name; close up of hands work­ing on a bike; etc.
I have some B-roll, but not nearly enough. As a result, it’s hard for the viewer to fig­ure out where we are and just how des­o­late some of these places are. It also gives me fewer edit­ing. B-roll is an excel­lent way to hide other mis­takes: if there’s some cam­era mixup while someone’s being inter­est­ing, you just cut to the B-roll for that sec­tion while leav­ing the audio on for the orig­i­nal shot, then back to the orig­i­nal when the cam­era is good again. The audi­ence things you were show­ing some inter­est­ing detail of the con­ver­sa­tion when you were really cov­er­ing your butt. Less B-roll means less to cover your butt, and that just ain’t pretty.

Related posts:

1. Oops
2. RAAM: still cranking
3. First day of shooting!
4. Video vs still pho­tog­ra­phy, pt 4