Weighing The Use of Stock Footage Over Doing It Yourself

There are many different reasons to use stock footage… perhaps you don’t have a camera, your budget is up for your production, or you might just need one extra pickup shot to finish off a piece.  Sometimes, it just doesn’t seem feasible to rent a camera, put your time into something, go on location, set up lights, and everything else that goes along with getting that shot.  That is where stock footage comes into play.  We’re going to discuss some situations where you might use stock footage over shooting it yourself, and what the benefits might possibly be.

Scenario #1 Location Complications

So say you are shooting a movie that the main setting takes place in the middle of a forest.  Easy enough, go out to your local park deep in the woods and get all your shots of you characters.  Oh wait, but what about that sweet flyover of the thick, dense forest that could be your establishing shot?  You have a couple options: rent a helicopter, or plane, the pilot, and shoot it yourself, or find a piece of stock footage of the same thing.  One option could cost you hundreds of dollars, plus time, scheduling, and other budget heavy aspects, when the other could take you literally five minutes to find and purchase, and turn out to be a fraction of the cost.  Other possibilities could be to hook up with a Vue artist, or find some stock flyovers in CG and purchase those… again, much cheaper than renting a helicopter.

Scenario #2 Forgotten Shots

This is an editor’s nightmare.  You give your DOP or cameraman a shot list, and they forgot to get that close up on the eyes, the macro shot of the water faucet, or the establishing shot of the coast.  Moreover, it was shot on a rented camera that costs a couple hundred a day with a 35mm lens adapter, so now what do you do?  Do you re-rent the camera and go shoot it yourself?  No way… I wouldn’t, I would find the shot that I need online and purchase it… and do some handy After Effects work to make it look the way I need, and to make it match the other footage.  Obviously this won’t work with characters and specific locations like businesses, but it puts it in your brain to remember there are other avenues to take when it comes to forgotten shots.

Scenario #3 Low Budget Productions

We’ve all seen those commercials for 5 Hour Energy Drink, and there is not a more obvious use of stock footage on the air on ANY channel.  But, you have to hand it to them, they were probably able to put together an entire commercial for less than a hundred bucks and a copy of iMovie.  This is where weighing “I’ll shoot it myself” vs purchasing clips online can get you a few more gigs from places like Craigslist, that might have low budgets, such as $300-$500 but want quality footage, but it just doesn’t make sense to hire actors, scout locations and set up lighting for that price.  You can easily spend a couple hours online, put together a list of clips you think the client may like that tie into their voice over or titles they want, and put it together for a low rate, and bam… you are paid with minimal effort on your part.

Scenario #4 Impossible Shots

This kind of ties into the first scenario, but were talking flyover shots of football stadiums, volcanoes erupting, demolitions of buildings, a shot of the Colosseum in Rome… things that just aren’t possible especially with low budgets.  Being able to turn to shots on places like VideoHive really is a great option to have when you are trying to establish that your spy chase movie really has taken you to China and you running through the town in pursuit, but in all actuality you just grabbed a nice establishing shot online, and filmed on location in the local Chinatown.

Scenario #5 The Green Screen Shot

Getting the funding to fly an actor and the camera crew to the middle of Egypt or the Sahara Desert is a difficult task, but grabbing some stock footage of the pyramids, and buying a green screen can make things a bit simpler.  Yet another great bit of technology that is movie magic is to use the keying method to place your actors in a virtual environment or even mix multiple clips to create a multi-layered scene that can make up an overlook of Hollywood without you having to leave your house.  You could grab a basic clean plate of a cityscape with lights, a piece of footage of the Hollywood hills, some shots of some trees or bushes, and stagger them in 3d space to give some depth and do a move back with your camera, and have your actors walk into frame.  Viola!  You look like you had a camera crew overlooking Hollywood with a couple actors, when all you did was light them accordingly and shoot it in your garage.

There are hundreds of different scenarios in which it is smarter and financially easier to use stock footage over shooting it yourself, because I mean, if it looks the same, no one is going to know the difference but you.  So my question to you all is, have you used stock footage in your productions, how did it work out, did anyone notice, and has it ever saved you in a bind?  Let us know in the comments!