Why You Should Add B-Roll to Your Talking Head Videos
If you want to keep your target audience engaged when watching your video content, you need to add additional footage to your talking head videos.
Every business should be creating talking head videos, especially if they plan on making educational content. The problem with this type of video is just showing the talking head can quickly become boring to your audience.
To create a more dynamic video experience, I'm going to explain why you should be adding supporting footage - B-Roll - to your talking head videos.
What is a Talking Head Video?
A talking head video is a video that involves a person talking to the camera as if they were talking directly to the viewer.
Typically, the person talking remains stationary throughout the video, with the background and camera angle remaining unchanged throughout the video - although this isn't always the case.
Talking head videos are a popular type of video where a person wants to give the viewer information about a product or service, tell a story or create educational content.
The Pros and Cons of Talking Head Videos
As a business owner, talking directly to your target audience is a great way to build trust and become an expert in your industry.
People like to deal with people, so you can add a human element to your content by showing your face. This is something that every business should be doing, not just when creating videos but throughout their entire content marketing.
The issue with many talking head videos is that they can sometimes be boring to the viewer. With attention spans decreasing, it's becoming harder and harder to keep viewers engaged for more extended periods.
Aside from having the video packed full of valuable content that educates, inspires & entertains, B-Roll can help maintain viewers attention.
Why you Should Add Supporting Footage
Adding supporting footage to your talking head videos does several things:
- It helps to add more context to your chosen topic
- It makes your video more visually interesting
- It helps to tell a deeper story.
- It increases the production value of your video, giving it that professional polish.
All these things will help you keep people's attention for longer, increasing the watch time on your video. A high watch time is just one of the critical metrics YouTube pays attention to, determining whether its algorithm should push your content to more people.
If a viewer watches your videos to the end, you also have a better chance of pushing them down your sales funnels with your strong call to actions.
Types of Supporting Footage You Could Add
Deciding on what additional footage you should be adding to your talking head videos depends on what you will be talking about.
For example, if you're talking about a specific product, you could include shots of the product itself, how that product gets made, or clips of the product in use.
Incorporating animations and graphics within your talking head videos are another great way of creating visually exciting and attention-grabbing additional shots. I use a lot of graphics and animations within my educational video content to highlight key points.
It's always worth having a plan in place for each video you create and having some form of a script, so you know what you will be saying. Once you know the key topics you'll be covering, it will be easier for you to identify additional footage you need to capture or graphics you'll need to create to help you illustrate those key points.
You can then put all of this information into what's called a shot list - a breakdown of all of the footage you need to tell your story!
Using Your B-Roll
When it comes to using B-Roll in the edit, I will typically group it in three's or fives, meaning three or five B-Roll shots back to back before cutting back to the person talking.
Doing this helps improve the flow of the video and stops the B-Roll from feeling jarring - having just one B-Roll clip can pull the viewer out of the experience.
I'll usually let the person talk for 5-10 seconds before adding B-Roll, and will never have a B-Roll shot last longer than 10 seconds.
Also, when cutting between the person and the B-Roll clips, you want to look out for natural pauses in their speech that will enable you to make the transition more seamless between your A-Roll and B-Roll or B-Roll and B-Roll.
Using these techniques will help you to take your videos to the next level!
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