May 12, 2011 \ Geoff Birmingham
Video: what is b-roll?

This is another 1-minute excerpt from an interview Rachel had with Jim Burns, CEO of Avitage, on the subject of b-roll.  In the top clip, I’ve added some b-roll grabbed from a client, Exploration School.  Just for the sake of comparison, I included the same clip but without the accompanying b-roll – just Rachel talking on camera.


Transcription of Video

Shots of kids dancing

Rachel voice over: B-roll is the extra footage that you capture in order to to have greater flexibility editing and also in order to enrich the story you’re trying to tell.

Sound bite with Program Director on camera: What I most like about this is that 10, 20 kids are going to get to know each other really well…

Rachel voice over: So instead of just having a talking head on video, you want to have other images that you can cut away to that are going to tell the story in a fuller way.

Rachel on camera: It can be additional video footage, it can be still photographs…it can be animation, other graphical elements.  So b-roll is really helpful in that regard.

Ending montage with different shots of kids in the lab, participating in sports, dancing, running around campus.