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5 Rules to Capturing B-roll

Lesson 17 from: Creating a Video From Start to Finish

Victor Ha

5 Rules to Capturing B-roll

Lesson 17 from: Creating a Video From Start to Finish

Victor Ha

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Lesson Info

17. 5 Rules to Capturing B-roll

Use these guidelines to capture better B-Roll for your project, from gear tips to determining what's important.

Lesson Info

5 Rules to Capturing B-roll

As we kind of talk about this further, I wanna give you some guidelines. I say rules, but they're more like the guidelines, so, keep the gear simple. B-Roll is about the B-Roll. It's not about the gear. I would sooner rather you capture a different angle stably, then to try to like chase someone around, with a camera, because you think that's the shot. Okay. Put it on a tripod, stick it on a monopod, get a good lens on it, capture it, and you're gonna see that when you have stable, usable B-Roll footage, it's going to save you. Next thing is, ask your subject what they think is important. Ask Ivan. He's like, oh, people. Don't just capture me, Victor, capture the people. Show who participates in this gym. Show who does this. Like, you, like and in my brain, I got this, I knew I did, now, the what and the how, will illustrate the lie. That's when that's important. You take the what, you take the how, and you have it inform the why. That's what's important. Because now that I know why he...

wakes up in the morning, I can show the reason he wakes up in the morning, are these people. Yeah. And that's such a different angle, such a different way to look at it. This is cool, I think a lot of times I get overzealous, we all do, we get so excited about recording, and one of my mistakes here, one of my mistakes here, in this shoot, was, I panicked, they started to roll around on mats, I grabbed the camera and ran out into the first half of the B-Roll shoot, I wasn't white balanced, I didn't shoot targets. Because I didn't watch before recording it. You need to realize that B-Roll's important, capturing footage is important, but B-Rolls like, I was there from like 4:30 until 9:30, five hours. If I were to miss the first like 20 minutes, that would have been okay. You know. If I just stopped, got a target, got that stuff. And you know what, maybe I should have gotten there early. You know. So there's things that I could've done better. From the first person POV, that's, that's like, not a rule, it's a nicety, you know the first person POV is like, pretend your opening a cabinet, okay, so from your perspective, is you see the cabinet drawers and you open them, okay. When I'm talking about First Person POV, imagine you're a piece of fruit on the cabinet shelf, and then let the doors open up. That's what I mean. So, give me the perspective of the fruit. Or give me the perspective of that candy bar. You know. As someone's grabbing it. Because I think that's an interesting angle that a lot of people don't leverage a lot of the time, and with a lot of the client profile videos, there's always a moment where you can do something like that. And it just shakes it up, it shakes people out of the, the monotony of watching a film sometimes, and it speeds up your edit. Mm kay, it gives you something really really tangible to put into an edit, that really helps someone move along. Mm kay. And I use that phrase a lot, moving along, have you guys ever sat and just waited, listened to nothing for five minutes? You know how long that is, right? It's agonizing. Watch a kid try to sit still for like three minutes. They can't do it. But the minute you give them a toy to play with, they can sit there for like 25, or maybe, maybe even four minutes, all right. And, but, that four minutes goes extremely faster then. So in the same way that you approach an edit, you've gotta approach an edit that way, is you gotta give people enough to look at, so that they're not yawning, or feeling this edit's just dragging. Mm kay. And internal rhythm is sometimes really important. As you guys develop that internal rhythm, in watching an edit, it's gonna be really really insightful for you, how you're gonna learn how to edit your own style. Mm kay. It's just a joke, this is the joke. I think a lot of times, when we capture B-Roll, we get so ingrained into thinking, oh my God, I gotta get this, I gotta get this, gotta get this, just take breaks, you know, in the middle of a B-Roll shoot, I take an hour break. And just eat a bit. You know. It was a hot sweaty stinky gym, bodies rolling around, sweat flying everywhere, I just had enough. I'd been in there since like, nine o'clock that morning, ten o'clock in the morning, and then, like I'm there, like nine o'clock at night, I needed a break. I needed to go and just like, chill out, grab a bottle of water, you know, and I came back and finished out the night. What I felt really really brought the homie edit for me. There's things that I got in the later half of that B-Roll shoot, that I don't think I would have been able to get had I just shot all the way through. And the joke about focus pulls is like, when DSLR video became really really popular, and a lot of people could like, shoot at that shell at the field, in like, a thousand percent of the work you saw, it was always this like, slow, focus pull from like away to the person, you know, and it was just like, this thing that happened all the time. Just focus pull after focus pull after focus pull. I'm like okay, I get it, I get it! It's shallow! I get it! Yeah, and so oh, you know what I'm not talking about here is like, why I chose the 5D Mark IV, over like the 5D Mark III, for this specific thing, so with the 5D Mark IV, in shooting 4K you get a crop factor of 1.7. What that does, is it affects your focal length, it also affects your depth of field. So I could shoot at like F4, like F4, on my 2470, or whatever it was, and get something the equivalent of F8. That's beautiful. Especially with all the action, the motion, like I got a lot in focus, without trying. Okay. So, and then also, it's just like, knowing your cameras. If I would have picked the 5D out, I'd have really had a lot of trouble focusing that night. Mm kay. 5D Mark IV, it crops in, because the way it's capturing 4K, it's using the center portion of the sensor, it's giving you a crop factor, you're still getting high quality video, it's just capturing it in a different way, but you can leverage that 1. crop very effectively, you know, and like, if you talk to a lot of DSLR filmmakers, oftentimes what they'll do is they'll carry a crop sensor camera exactly for that reason. You know. They'll carry it like crops to camera, shoot at 2.8, get the exposure value of a 2.8, but like get the depth of film like F4, which is really really nice. Especially when you have to kind of like, kind of hand-hold, or like, you know shoot moving objects. So that's a really really, I mean I didn't think that I, didn't even think to think to talk about it until just now, so that's why I shot that 5D. And then with something like the DJI Osmo, I grabbed that because I knew I was gonna have to run around people. I just knew. There was no way for me to set up for me to set a slider. I couldn't've set up any tripods and gotten the footage that I needed, you know, tripods, a monopod and a DSLR, and an Osmo was all I needed. And a couple targets and the light in here. That shoot, for the B-Roll, was much more simple than the shoot for like the, the primary footage, the A-Roll. You know and I did make a, I did make a comment about picking, picking up some good audio quality out of it, you can make a choice in the editing room. You can either choose to cut all of the audio from your B-Roll, or you can choose to kind of throw in, a little bit of light, B-Roll, audio, to kind of give some context, I think that for me, I chose to take out the B-Roll audio because I wanted, I wanted Ivan's voice to be what people were hearing. Especially the new customers liked watching this video, I didn't want them to be scared or distracted by the whistles, and the grunting, and the sound of things getting hit, I think that can be very intimidating, by someone who doesn't know what they're gonna be experiencing, so I took, I chose to take that out. And I think it really helped the edit. I think it really kind of gave me a better understanding of what someone who isn't familiar with this, cause if you think about it from the other perspective, like someone who's well-versed in this type of fighting in gym, they already know what the sounds are like. So they're already probably hearing the sounds in their head, as they're watching it. So I'm making that proactive decision of the limiting of the B-Roll audio, was actually I think a good decision on my part. But I recorded it nonetheless, because I didn't know I wanted to do that. So a lot of your choices happen in the editing room.

Class Materials

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Keynote
Interview Questions
5 Rules to B Roll

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Gear Guide

Ratings and Reviews

Cheryl Winkles
 

You're awesome, I learnt a lot from you, this is like a must-have first course for anyone who wants to step into video or filmmaking world. Highly recommended and thank you a million Victor Ha.

a Creativelive Student
 

Fantastic course, Victor is one of the finest instructors I have encountered. Great stuff, I would highly recommend this for anyone who wants to work in video

Student Work

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