I was watching an old
movie the other night or maybe it was a television show; I wasn’t paying much
attention. However I did notice some stock footage being used and it struck me
as enlightening. Stock footage is often seen in movies or television shows. It
is often used to establish a place where the action of the film is supposedly
taking place. Many times it sticks out like a sore thumb because it might be
grainy or not have the same quality of the other portions of the show. Of
course the scenes that aren’t stock footage are usually being done in a studio
somewhere. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves them from shooting
new material. You might be watching something today with a clip in it that you
may find in a totally different program weeks or years later. Sometimes, the
powers that be may use same old stock footage because they don’t want to make
the effort or to have the expense to find something that might be different, so
you wind up seeing the same images over and over. The enlightening part to me
was how much our lives are like stock footage. We go into the warehouse or the
office, we talk to the same people, we perform the same tasks over and over
again. One day looks pretty much looks like another. If you were to film this
it would seem like stock footage. If you watched it later you couldn’t tell one
day or time from another. It would make for a very unexciting feature film.
