Stock Footage - Movies and Television

Movies and Television

Stock footage can be used to integrate news footage or notable figures into a film. For instance, the Academy Award-winning film Forrest Gump used stock footage extensively, modified with computer generated imagery to portray the lead character meeting such historic figures such as John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and John Lennon.

News programs use film footage from their libraries when more recent images are not available. Such usage is often labeled on-screen with an indication that the footage being shown is file footage.

Television and movies series also often recycle footage taken from previous installments. For instance, the Star Trek franchise kept a large collection of starships, planets, backgrounds and explosions which would appear on a regular basis throughout Star Trek's five series and ten films, being used with minimal alteration. That kept production costs down as models, mattes, and explosions were expensive to create. The advances in computer graphics in the late 1990s and early 2000s helped to significantly reduce the cost of Star Trek's production, and allowed for a much wider variety of shots than previous model and painting based visuals.

Some series, particularly those made for children, such as Teletubbies, reuse footage that is shown in many episodes. Meant for a young audience, the approach increases viewers' familiarity between shows. This introduces problems such as the requirement to, for example, wear the same clothing and inconsistency can sometimes become a problem. When cleverly filmed it is possible to avoid many of these problems.

Many broadcast shows use stock-footage clips as establishing shots of a particular city, which imply that the show is shot on location when in fact, it may be shot in a Burbank studio. One or two establishing shots of an exotic location such as the Great Wall of China, Easter Island or French Polynesia will save production companies the major costs of transporting crew and equipment to those actual locations.

Stock footage is often used in commercials when there is not enough money or time for production. More often than not these commercials are political or issue-oriented in nature. Sometimes it can be used to composite moving images which create the illusion of having on-camera performers appear to be on location. B-roll is also another common term for stock footage and is used in reference to film making.

Stock footage that appears on television screens or monitors shown in movies or television shows is referred to as "playback." In Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy which stars Will Ferrell who stars as a San Diego news anchor, the studio purchased archival 1970's clips from San Diego stock footage firm New & Unique Videos. The playback footage of a hurricane featured in Disney's Smart House came from the vaults of the same San Diego firm.