B-Roll is a secondary type of footage, often captured to add detail to another video. This is seen commonly across all types of media, from newscasts to feature length films. It’s what editors cut to in between the main footage and dialogue.
This helps you tell a deeper story than you could with just one angle, or someone talking directly to camera. Imagine what the news would be like if the presenter just spoke the whole time with no on-the-scene, other footage or cross to other journalists. It would be much less engaging and interesting.
With the rise of viral vertical video, the need for B-Roll content is growing as well. For most businesses once a social media trend starts they don’t have much time to react and post something before the trend passes them by. Capturing B-Roll of common actions and situations helps to speed up the content creation process.
In marketing, just like in traditional media, B-Roll can be used to keep viewers interested so that they continue to engage with the content.
B-Roll includes everything outside of the principal subjects interacting with each other or talking into the camera, so even when you create a video talking to the camera, you can intersperse this B-Roll content to keep people engaged.
In social media content specifically, this same footage can be used exclusively to tell a story. So often you can use an audio or song to tell the rest of the story so you won’t need to add that layer of dialogue.
If a picture paints a thousand words, and you film at 30 frames per second, simple match shows you how much you can communicate in one short clip.
Usually the most engaging content will include multiple clips of different angles or steps in a process. Sometimes there’s a lot going on in one clip, but in general, switching things up quickly can most retain attention.
You’ll want to start with your content calendar. What you post about will lead much of what you record since you’ll want to prioritise content you’re likely to put to use.
You might like to film:
If in doubt, over-shoot. Keep the camera recording, and you can edit it later.
Keep your edited down snippets of B-Roll handy, to quickly edit together when a relevant audio sparks your creativity. You may still shoot an extra couple bits, but your existing library will give you some of the pieces to the puzzle.
How you edit together your social content is up to you. You may use Instagram Reels within the app itself, Instagram Reels Templates, Capcut, TikTok, Canva or Adobe Premiere Pro. There are lots of apps that are built to help with this, so you may like to try a few to find which is most intuitive for you.
If you were to edit together a format of video for another platform, such as YouTube or a form of advertising, this B-Roll content can come in very handy to round out the visuals and add more detail for the viewer.
Don’t delete your bloopers, keep them. So often we see audio that relates to something going awry, and bloopers can come in very handy.
You might like to track which content you’ve used through your filing system, or with a spreadsheet so that you know when its time to create more content and what of. This can also help you to share a range of content and reduce any repetition.
As you create more content, you’ll improve each element of planning, filming, editing and posting your content. However, you won’t learn these things and find your flow til you make a start.
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