When committing acts of television (hat-tip to Live Apartment Fire for that one) it is necessary to have to proper b-roll to tell a story. For the uninitiated, b-roll is the video you see during a news story while you hear an anchor or reporter’s voice.
“B-roll” is apparently an “old film term” which I am too young to understand, and you probably don’t care about the details anyway.
Here’s what’s interesting: Sometimes reporters will find themselves assigned to cover a story that is “weak on video”. Usually that means the story is about an event that was not visually capture, or a story about an issue. These are often referred to as a “great story for newspapers”.
Apparently, an Asian media mogul has developed a way to fudge that b-roll by making news reports look like video games. As this report from CNN shows, his company creates animations to depict the news.
Wouldn’t it just be easier to call these guys?
Allow me to explain. Back in the day, they’d play two reels of film simultaneously for a reporter package. The A-roll carried the primary editorial material, like the interviews and standup (the voice track played on an audio tape cart, which rolled separately.)
The B-roll carried video — typically visual filler — that wouldn’t work on the A-roll. The director could cut between the two reels. If he was feeling fancy, sometimes he’d even dissolve. All this would happen on the fly — the a-roll, the b-roll and the audio cart. And they’d hit supers too.
A mere fifteen years ago, ENG editors would make A and B rolls when they wanted to do a lot of dissolves or other effects. It was like a big puzzle, with black holes on the A roll coinciding with the corresponding pictures on the B roll and vice versa. You should try it.
Like, next time you shoot a story, whenever that might be.