I’m occasionally faced with the challenge of producing a video about a subject where I can’t film b-roll. Children are the best example for many reasons. Let’s say you want b-roll of children playing in a park. The easiest thing to do would be to walk to the park and start filming kids. That would also be creepy. The best scenario is organizing a time to meet a friend with kids at the park, but then you’re limited to only filming those kids.
I produced a video for the District Attorney on their truancy program. The goal of this program is to reduce truancy in the schools through various ways like counseling, classes, group meetings, and disciplinary measures. When you consider the goal of the program is to educate parents and students on the importance of attendance, filming the students could come across as shaming and counterproductive to the truancy program process.
While I like to keep videos at a 4 minute maximum length, sometimes the client wants the video to be longer or sometimes you just can’t get all of the information in under that time. This video ended being almost 12 minutes long, so it was important for me to keep the audience engaged as much as possible. When I don’t have b-roll, here are a few tricks I use.
Pauses give importance to what you are about to say. You can create pauses in video by creating chapters and adding title cards. In this instance, I added titles that posed a question for the upcoming section; “What are the Goals of the Truancy Program?”, “What is the Process?”, “Why is the Truancy Program so Important?” In addition to emphasizing the upcoming section, it breaks up a 12 minute video into multiple 2-3 minute videos that are easier to digest.
Additional text that echoes what the interviewee is saying emphasizes what is being said and also gives the audience something else to concentrate on. The viewing experience is more active when the audience has more to look at. By giving them additional text to read, you keep their attention.
Keep the cuts short. This follows the same theory as the previous trick; You can hold the audience’s attention by giving them more to look at. I could have produced this video by only interviewing one person. Instead, I interviewed four people and asked them the same questions and then edited their answers to create one comprehensive answer.
Lael Wageneck 