The "B-Roll of Our Life"

When I teach documentary production workshops, I often spend some time on the “Kinds of Footage” that serve as the building blocks of documentary storytelling.

What documentary is perhaps most known for is Building Block #1: “Vérité.” From the Latin for Veritas, meaning “truth,” vérité are moments or scenes the camera captures unfolding in real time that are part of the story itself. Think of a protest — there is no pausing the protestors to ask that they retreat a block and dodge that canister of tear gas again. You either got that canister “in the can” or you didn’t.

The second major building block is The Interview. There are many themes and variations of The Interview, but most simply, it’s someone speaking at or toward the camera, answering prompts or questions that help the story unfold in a more expository way. Interviews often serve as the main spine of the story, though for vérité-driven docs, they’re also used to “back-tell” or explain things that happened in the immediate or less immediate aftermath of a scene.

And then…

There is B-Roll.

B-Roll is secondary footage intercut with your main footage — most often interviews — to add visual context and hide edits. At its worst, it’s wallpaper: eliminating the jump cuts in that 60-minute interview you had to get down to seven minutes. But at its best, it can add another dimension to your project entirely. It can establish a scene (a tree-lined suburban street), set a mood (a series of dark prison interiors), or visualize something a subject is talking about — perhaps we’ve arranged to film them in their pottery studio.

B-Roll is notoriously the least glamorous building block, but it does so much — creatively and technically — to hold a story together. And it can be incredibly personal.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been filming in homes or offices when, after the interview, I ask to film some B-Roll. Diplomas on walls, family photos on the shelves, the subject’s gardening routine, silly magnets on the fridge, the proverbial “Live Laugh Love” sign in the kitchen — you get the point. Having recently relocated to Maine for a temporary respite from the noisy hellscape that is New York City (which I can say because it’s been my home for the past 15 years), I brought a few items with me to make my cabin feel like home. Pictures of family and friends, some of my musical instruments, my cat Thomas, obviously. It’s been nice to be surrounded by less — but that less means so much more to me than the generic home goods decor dotting the shelves in my Brooklyn apartment.

This is what I mean when I say B-Roll is personal. The things we surround ourselves with, the hobbies we keep — these are exactly what an imaginary documentary director would ask to film. And they say a lot about us. B-Roll as visual evidence of the texture of our lives. It’s essentially our identities made manifest.

Which makes B-Roll, I’d argue, maybe the most important building block of all. Because we can’t change what happens to us (that’s the vérité). And we’re often put on the spot when asked to explain ourselves (that’s the interview). But what we choose to do, and what we surround ourselves with? That part is largely on us.

And so now I have a new wish for myself. I hope for myself a life wherein the B-Roll is mine, even if not uniquely. Not just the pictures on the fridge, but the ways I invest my time and energy, what I play and how, the people I choose to spend time with. But never, ever, a “Live Laugh Love” sign in my kitchen.

Who knew that a basic building block of documentary filmmaking could be so illuminating — not just of our characters’ lives, but of our own?