Shooting the right shots

Whatever kind of camera you end up with, you will need to capture a variety of shots to make the edit run smoothly. If you’ve planned well, you’ll go into a shoot with a list of shots that you need to capture, and it’s very satisfying to tick them off as you go.

The shots you need will vary from shoot to shoot, but it’s rare that you can simply capture a subject once from a single angle and be done. Nearly always, you’ll want to capture two different kinds of footage: A-roll and B-roll.

A-roll

This is simply the primary video that you need to capture. If people speak on camera or to a camera, that’s A-roll:

Figure 2.14: A subject talking on camera? That’s A-roll (from Brad Olsen’s Off the Tracks)

In dramas, a scene where people are talking is A-roll, and in a corporate piece, the interviews are A-roll. This is the spine of the story — the driving message keeping...