Why We Shoot So Much Footage For A Three-Minute Brand Video

If you've ever been on a video production set, you might wonder how we can spend an entire day - or sometimes several days - filming for a brand video that's ultimately only going to be three or four minutes long.

Where does all that footage go?

The answer is that we're not showing up to film three minutes of content. We're showing up to capture everything we might need to create the best three minutes of content. And those are two very different things.

A recent production we did with Hatch is a great example. The project included a three-to-four-minute brand video, a one-to-two-minute recruitment and culture video, and ten social cutdowns. To create those pieces, we spent three shoot days dedicated to B-roll alone and came home with roughly six hours of B-roll footage.

That might sound like an insane amount of footage compared with the runtime of the finished videos, but to us, that's exactly what we want. When we get into the edit, we don't want to be wishing we'd filmed more. We want choices.

And the interesting thing is that we're not necessarily showing up on set without knowing what we need. In fact, it's almost the exact opposite. Before we ever roll a camera, we generally have a pretty detailed idea of the story we're trying to tell.

We just want enough material to tell it really, really well.

A Three-Minute Video Will Most Certainly Start With Hours and Hours Of Raw Footage

The math of video production can seem a little ridiculous from the outside.

Three shoot days. Six hours of B-roll. Multiple interviews around 30 minutes each. All of that material goes into a project where the primary brand film might ultimately run for three or four minutes.

But every minute we capture isn't supposed to become a minute of the finished film.

When we're filming B-roll, we're trying to build a visual library around the story. We want establishing shots. We want people working. We want details. We want interactions. We want different environments. We want the little moments happening around the main action that might only appear on screen for two or three seconds but make the finished film feel alive.

We're also rarely filming something once and moving on. If an action matters, we're generally going to capture it at least twice. Depending on what we're filming, we may want different framing, different moments within the action, or simply another clean take so we have options later.

All of that adds up quickly.

And that's before you even consider that a production like Hatch isn't generating one finished video. We're thinking about a main brand film, a separate recruitment and culture piece, and ten individual social cutdowns. A shot that doesn't make the three-minute brand film might become the perfect visual for the culture video. Something else might be exactly what we need for a 20-second social piece.

That's why we always want to capture as much as we reasonably can while we're there.

Production day is the opportunity to get it. Once we're back in the edit, we can't magically create an angle we never filmed.

We Usually Know The Story Before We Start Shooting

There's an idea that documentary-style filmmaking means showing up with cameras, filming absolutely everything, and eventually discovering the story somewhere in the edit.

That's not really how we approach brand films.

For most of our larger productions, we've already done a significant amount of storytelling work during pre-production. We develop what we call a target script, which essentially maps out the story we're trying to tell before production begins.

That doesn't mean we're handing interview subjects a script and asking them to perform it. The actual words still come from the people we're interviewing. Instead, the target script helps us understand the larger structure we're working toward. We know the ideas we need to communicate, the different parts of the story, which interview subjects might help us tell those parts, and the kinds of visuals we're likely going to need to support them.

That's a really important distinction because it changes the way we shoot.

We're not collecting six hours of B-roll because we have absolutely no idea what the finished video is going to be. We're collecting six hours because we do know what we're trying to build, and we want enough visual material to build it properly.

Of course, things can change. Someone might give us an interview answer that's better than anything we anticipated during pre-production. We might see something happening on location that wasn't on the shot list and immediately realize we need to capture it. A story can evolve once you're actually around the people and places you're filming.

The target script gives us direction without locking us into something so rigid that we stop paying attention to what's actually happening in front of us.

We Don't Know The Best Moments Until We Hear Them

Our interviews are generally around 30 minutes long, which means even a handful of interview subjects can quickly create hours of material.

Again, we don't expect all of that material to make the finished film.

We need enough time with someone to actually get beyond the basics. Maybe the first version of an answer is fine, but then we ask them to explain it differently and suddenly they give us exactly what we needed. Maybe they mention something interesting and we spend another five minutes exploring it. Maybe they give us a tiny phrase buried in the middle of a much longer answer that ultimately becomes one of the most important lines in the entire video.

Even with a target script, we still have to hear what people actually say.

Once we're in post-production, we're going back through those interviews and finding the pieces that best bring the story we've been developing to life. We're listening for the language, emotion, details, and transitions that allow us to turn a collection of separate conversations into something that feels like one cohesive film.

Because we did so much work before production, our initial edit usually isn't some enormous 20-minute monster that we then have to desperately cut down to three minutes. We're generally pretty close to our intended structure because we knew what we were looking for from the beginning.

That's one of the reasons we put so much emphasis on pre-production. More footage doesn't have to mean a messier edit. When the production has a clear creative direction, all that material becomes a library of options rather than a pile of footage we're hoping contains a story.

B-Roll Gives Us Options

This is where those six hours of Hatch B-roll become incredibly valuable.

A three-minute brand film can move through a surprising number of visuals. An interview subject might only speak for ten seconds while we show four or five different shots over their answer. Then we move into another section of the story and need an entirely different visual sequence.

Multiply that across several minutes, and suddenly you need a lot of imagery.

And we don't just want a shot that technically works. We want to be able to choose the best shot for that particular moment.

Maybe we have several different options of a crew working, but one has a better interaction between two people. Maybe one shot has beautiful movement that perfectly matches the pacing of the music. Maybe another gives us exactly the visual transition we need between two sections. Maybe there's a tiny detail shot that suddenly becomes incredibly useful because of something someone says in an interview.

You don't necessarily know which of those shots is going to become important while you're standing on set.

That's why our philosophy with B-roll is pretty straightforward:

Get as much as you can.

We're obviously still shooting with intention. We're not rolling cameras randomly for six hours and hoping for the best. We know what the story needs and we're actively looking for material that supports it.

But once we're in a situation that's worth filming, we want options.

If something is important enough to capture, we'll generally get it at least twice. We don't want to put all of the pressure on one take and discover weeks later that someone walked through the background, the action wasn't quite right, or we simply wish we had another version.

The time to give ourselves options is while we're standing there with the cameras.

More Footage Gives Us More Freedom In The Edit

Once we get into post-production, we start going through both sides of what we've captured: the interviews and the B-roll.

The interviews are giving us the narrative. The B-roll is giving us the visual language to bring that narrative to life.

Having a lot of material means we can make decisions based on what makes the film better rather than what footage happens to be available.

That's a huge difference.

If we only captured exactly enough B-roll to cover the target script we wrote before production, we'd have very little flexibility when the story inevitably shifts. Maybe an interview subject explains something differently than we expected. Maybe one section ends up shorter. Maybe another deserves more time. Maybe we realize in the edit that two shots we'd originally imagined together don't actually work next to each other.

With enough coverage, none of that is a crisis.

We have somewhere else to go.

This becomes even more important when a project has multiple deliverables. With Hatch, we weren't only thinking about one three-to-four-minute film. The same production needed to support the recruitment and culture piece and ten social cutdowns.

Those videos don't all need to look identical.

Having a deep library of footage gives us the freedom to make each deliverable feel like its own piece while still keeping everything visually connected to the same larger campaign.

That's why we don't look at unused footage as wasted footage. Options are part of what we're creating on set.

Cutting Something Doesn't Mean It Wasn't Good

When you shoot hours of footage for a video that's only a few minutes long, simple math tells you that the overwhelming majority of what you captured isn't going to appear in that particular finished edit.

That's completely normal.

The goal isn't to prove that every shot we captured was necessary by squeezing it somewhere into the final video. The goal is to have enough strong material that we're able to be selective.

Sometimes we'll have multiple shots that could all work beautifully in the same place. We only need one of them.

Sometimes we capture an entire sequence because we think it's going to play an important role in the story, and once everything comes together, we realize the film simply doesn't need it.

Sometimes a shot doesn't belong in the main brand film but becomes incredibly useful in a social cutdown or another deliverable.

That's the nature of production.

If every single shot we filmed absolutely had to make the final video, we'd be making creative decisions based on what we captured rather than what's best for the story.

We'd much rather have too many good options than not enough.

The Final Video Should Feel Simple

The funny thing about all of this is that the audience should never be thinking about it.

When you watch the finished three-minute brand film, you shouldn't be wondering how many hours of B-roll we captured, how many times we filmed an action, how many interview questions we asked, or how much planning went into deciding which shot appears over which sentence.

The video should just work.

That's part of what all that preparation and coverage is ultimately buying us.

A finished brand film might feel incredibly simple: someone says something meaningful, we see exactly the right visual to support it, the story moves naturally into the next idea, and three minutes later it feels like you've actually gotten to know the company.

Behind those three minutes might be multiple shoot days, hours of interviews, six hours of B-roll, a target script developed before production, and an enormous library of footage that gave us the ability to make thousands of tiny creative decisions along the way.

That's not excessive.

That's the process.

We're not spending three days filming because we need three days of content.

We're spending three days filming because when someone eventually watches those three minutes, we want every second of them to be the best version of the story we could make.