A b-roll list you can use again

You cut a sentence out of the middle of a paragraph and the video hiccups. Your head jumps. You try moving the cut a word earlier and it still looks wrong, because the problem was never where the cut sits. The problem is that there is nothing to put over it.

Often, a short cutaway is enough to cover a join while the voice continues underneath. Recording a few at the end of an existing shoot uses the setup already in place, though the extra filming still takes time.

What is b-roll for?

Covering the moment you removed something.

B-roll is the general name for any picture that is not your main shot. Most explanations of it talk about mood and texture, which is fair for films and beside the point for a teaching video. In a tutorial it does two jobs, and the first one is structural: it hides an edit. Your voice runs continuously, the picture goes elsewhere for a moment, and the cut underneath becomes invisible.

The second job is showing the thing you are talking about while you talk about it, which sounds obvious and is skipped constantly by people who describe an object at length while sitting next to it, on camera, holding it.

Use a template as a prompt, then make the list yours

Search for a b-roll shot list and you get shots for somebody else's video. Hands typing on a laptop. Coffee being poured. Somebody walking through a doorway looking purposeful.

None of those are wrong, and none of them are yours. The clips that cover your cuts are the small physical actions of your own trade, and no template contains tapping the tuning fork or wiping the blade before the next cut or turning the page back to check something. Those clips belong to one person, they take a minute each to film, and they cannot be bought.

So the useful thing is not a list. It is the twenty minutes that produces your list.

How do you build your own list?

Walk the room and watch your hands

Go into the place you work and do ten minutes of ordinary work, paying attention to nothing except what your hands are doing. You are looking for the actions you perform without deciding to: the reach, the wipe, the adjustment, the thing you always pick up first.

Those are the clips. They feel too small to be worth filming, so they go unfilmed and your cuts jump.

Name them as actions, not objects

Write actions where movement matters: picking up the knife, lifting the piano lid. Include static details too when they explain something or give the edit a useful place to land.

Film each one longer than the gap

Ten seconds an action, as a starting point. It sounds absurd for a join lasting a second and a half, but it decides whether the clip is usable. A clip that begins at the exact moment the hand enters the frame has nowhere for the cut to land. You want the movement already underway when the join arrives, and still going when it leaves.

Three finished lists

In a kitchen

Wiping the board down. Salt going into a pan from a height. A drawer opening and a spoon coming out. The tap running over something. Oil hitting a hot pan and moving. Chopping, filmed from three heights, because one chop filmed three ways is three clips.

In a workshop

A tool being picked up and set down. Shavings being swept aside. A drawer of screws opening. Clamps going on. The finished piece, where it helps show the result. Safety glasses coming off, which is the closest a workshop has to a full stop.

At a desk

A notebook being opened at a marked page. A pen being put down. A screen being turned to face somebody. Sleeves being pushed up. Two hands going flat on the table before an explanation, which is a gesture almost everybody makes and almost nobody has on file.

How often will you use these?

Constantly, which is the whole argument for spending the hour.

A cut is a cut whatever the video was about. Ten clips of your own hands doing ordinary things in your own workspace will cover joins across a year of uploads, in videos on subjects you have not thought of yet, because none of them depend on what you were saying. The only things that date them are the room changing and your clothes appearing in frame, and the second of those is an argument for filming most of them from the wrists down.

Where the hour goes

Film them at the end of a day you were already filming, when you would otherwise be packing up. That is not a scheduling preference, it is the part that makes them usable: the light is where it was, the camera is where it was, the room looks the way it looks in everything else you have made.

If you film more later, check the light, room, clothes and purpose before dropping it into an earlier video. Some differences matter to continuity; others will not affect the shot’s job.

Sources and evidence

Our method. Building a shot list from ten minutes of watching your own hands at ordinary work, filmed at the end of a day already being filmed so the light and room match everything else, is this studio's working method for cheap, reusable cutaway footage, not a universal list.