if you want to make YouTube videos that have a high average view duration you're going to need b-roll and if you're a solo content creator you're going to need to film that b-roll by yourself this is something that I have heavily invested in in my YouTube channel over the past couple of years and it has really increased the quality of my video and my average view duration having more interesting creative visuals just keeps your viewer engaged longer and it also just makes you happier with the end product of your video so today I am finally
sharing my Ultimate Guide to building your own stock footage or voll Library as a content creator from planning to filming to organizing your files I'm going to take you through all of the steps so let's get into it and if filming all of this yourself stresses you out a bit later in the video I'm going to share a hack for getting highquality b-roll without having to pick up a camera so stay tuned for that the first crucial step in building up your b-roll library is making a shot list honestly the way that I've built up
my own b-roll library is just slowly over time filming specific b-roll clips for specific videos and then organizing them in a larger folder for me to use again in the future but if you're totally starting from scratch then I highly recommend setting aside a day to capture five or six different b-roll scenes that you can then repurpose and use over and over again in your future videos and to organize that whole operation you're going to want to create a shot list before you set up your camera and just try to start filming I actually went
ahead and created a free b-roll shot list template that you can grab at the link in the description it's basically a notion table where you can add in different categories of b-roll that you want to capture plus there's columns for every clip to remind you to grab one wide shot one medium shot and one closeup and don't worry if you're not familiar with those terms I'm going to show you exactly what wide medium and close-up look like like in just a minute I love capturing b-roll this way because it means that you're going to have
more variety and more options for actually using those b-roll clips within a sequence really it just gives you more options without having to film a million different scenes you can capture like five different scenes do three clips of each of them and then all of a sudden you have 15 clips of b-roll that you can use when you're planning this you want to come up with different scenes that cover the topics and themes that you tend to talk about in your videos ultimately that is what b-roll is for it's a visual represent presentation of the
topics or themes that you're discussing in your videos so think through the type of stuff that you tend to talk about in your videos and come up with a few ideas of how you can visually represent that through your b-roll for example if you often talk about confidence or self-care or mental health then maybe you would capture some b-roll scenes of you journaling lighting some candles maybe doing some yoga if you talk about fashion and Beauty a lot then maybe you'll capture some clips of you taking items out of your closet organizing your makeup drawer
doing your skin care routine or trying on an outfit in front of your mirror there are Limitless options really when it comes to the type of b-roll that you want to capture and it doesn't always have to be literal sometimes you can just include a clip of like the vibe of something that you're talking about here's a bonus tip for you if you really want to level up your b-roll as you're shooting think about the emotions that you're portraying I didn't used to really consider this when I was filming my b-roll and so all of
my Clips were me just kind of looking being generally like neutrally happy which is fine I think that's good for the most part but every so often you know in my videos I talk about feeling insecure or feeling frustrated not knowing what to create and so I started recording some voll clips of me looking like I didn't know what to say in front of the camera or looking like I was really trying to come up with an idea or just like looking sad and frustrated yes this is really going to test your acting skills but
I promise it's super helpful because it's a little bit jarring if you're talking about feeling frustrated or set and then the b-roll that you're showing is you looking really happy and chipper so as you're planning your b-roll shots maybe consider including one or two that portray certain emotions that you frequently talk about once you have your b-roll shot list written down it's time to get out that camera and put those acting skills to work let's talk gear for a second normally I'm shooting with my Sony zve E10 with my Sigma 16 mm lens when it
comes to shooting b-roll you don't really need to capture audio unless you're doing something specific and you want some kind of like ambient or environmental noise but honestly I just keep my road video micro on this camera pretty much all the time out of habit so that's what I'm doing today but generally you don't have to worry about the audio that much cuz you're mostly just going to use it as silent Clips so today we are shooting a scene of me reading a book by the pool because I'm in my last few days of staying
at this Airbnb so I got to soak it in before I go back to Van life once we've established our scene I like to start wide and then work my way into the medium and close-up shot so you're just going to set up your camera kind of visualizing where you're going to be in the scene sometimes I like to use Sony's Imaging Edge app on my phone it's really convenient because you can connect it via Wi-Fi to your camera and then you can get a preview on your screen of what your camera is seeing and
you can even start and stop the recording from your phone as well this is super helpful when you're filming clips of yourself cuz it means I can position my myself in the scene and see how it's looking without having to run back and forth to the camera but don't worry if you don't have that app or you don't have a camera that's compatible with it for years I've been doing the run back and forth of the camera thing and it works just fine so you get your camera position where you kind of think it's going
to look good and then you can just hit the record button run into the scene sit down and pose where you think you're going to be for like 2 seconds and then run back to the camera again and then you can just preview that clip and see if it looks how you want it to look honestly sometimes that Sony app can be a little bit glitchy so I I do this quite often as well okay so once you know you're happy with your framing you're going to just hit record run into the scene sit down
and then just pose act act natural as much as you can for like 10 to 15 seconds that's about how long you're going to need really try your best to pretend that the camera is not there don't keep looking over and checking to see if it's recording my general rule about b-roll is like I'm not going to look into the lens because then it kind of like breaks the fourth wall I only look into the lens when I'm actually like talking to you okay so once the 10 or 15 seconds are up then you're just
going to go back and hit record again on your camera to stop the clip now that we've captured our initial wide shot it's time to move the camera in and grab your medium and then your close-up shot one thing I want to note about this the beginner temptation is going to be just to move the camera forward a few feet to grab that Medium shot but I want to encourage you when you move the camera don't just take take three steps forward actually change the angle and get a slightly different view on your scene this
is because if you only just move your camera forward a few feet you're essentially going to create a jump cut that may be a little bit jarring especially if your movements don't exactly line up between your wide shot and your medium shot here's an example of what it looks like when you just cut directly from your wide shot to your kind of three steps ahead medium shot and here's what it looks like when we cut between our wide shot and a medium shot that it's been angled slightly differently you can see it just feels a
little bit more smooth and less jarring and in general it's just better to get more variety of shots so keep that in mind when you're setting up your medium shot try to get a slightly different angle from your wide shot okay so we're going to repeat that process again hit the record button jump into the scene act for 10 to 15 seconds and then get back up and stop your camera recording finally we're going to adjust our camera a third time in the same scene for your close-up shot so once again I recommend Shifting the
angle slightly as well as getting closer to your subject and again just capture 10 to 15 seconds of your acting and then hit the record button again so that is the general workflow you pick a scene and you work through your wide medium and closeup and then you can repeat that entire process again for the next scene that you want to capture okay so you've captured your footage now it's time to store it somewhere in a way that you'll actually be able to find it again in the future when you need it welcome to the
wonderful world of file organization I am a huge nerd and I love this kind of thing I'm just going to give you very simple instructions rather than like pontificating on My Philosophy around file organization and naming structures we're going to try to keep this actionable okay so step one make a new folder and call it b-roll if you think you're going to have a few different major categories of types of b-roll then now is a good time to make subfolders here's what mine looks like for for example I talk about Instagram creation so I've got
a folder for that I've got one for YouTube creation working in my van and lifestyle so if you think you're going to have a few major categories like that I find it helpful to organize this Boll folder a little bit further now you're going to go ahead and you're going to find that footage that you shot today and you're going to actually bring it into one of those folders so in my case this reading by the pool is most relevant to Lifestyle so I'm going to open up that folder and then I'm just going to
select these clips and get them into my lifestyle folder okay now obviously we want to name them so that we can search for them later so I'm going to go ahead and rename them to reading by the pool wide reading by the pool medium and reading by the pool closeup I do it like that specifically so that when I sort them by name they'll actually show up together because like I was saying before often if you have this variety of Clips you might want to use a few in conjunction with one another like let's say
I'm talking about oh I took some time off I was relaxing I was reading by the pool you know it's more interesting for me to show two different angles of that rather than just one okay so once you're done all of that you can open up your Premiere Pro project file and you could click and drag in this entire folder for me I've already got this folder structure set up in my Premiere Pro project template so as I add new clips to my b-roll library I'll individually make sure to import them into that Premiere Pro
File as well after I've renamed them all right so in this case we've opened up my template here I'm going to open up my b-roll bin and go down to Lifestyle and open that one up then I'll just open the finder window where I have these clips and I'll select them all and add them into my lifestyle folder if you're diligent about this you can make sure that your bins in Premiere always line up with your folders on your hard drive now as I'm editing my video and I get to the point where I need
a clip of me reading by the pool I can just go over to my project window here and type in reading and you'll see those clips all appear so then I can drag it over to my source window I can select the clip and the part of the clip that I need and then really easily just drag that visual onto my timeline it makes the editing process so smooth when you do this organization and it Advance okay so sometimes you can't always film all of the b-roll clips that you might want to include in your
videos for example maybe you want some aial footage of the city that you're in but you don't have a drone or maybe you're talking about your top travel destinations that are on your bucket list and so you haven't personally filmed footage of the Cities you're talking about yet or maybe it just doesn't make sense for you to invest the time to get up and shoot a time lapse of the sunrise for just like a 5-second clip in your video I mean if you want to do that then you're very dedicated and I applaud you but
for the rest of us I personally love using story blocks for those exact scenarios story blocks really is the perfect b-roll solution for all content creators I've been using story blocks for years to add more Dynamic visuals to my videos so story blocks is a stock media website you can get access to tons of beautiful stock footage background music sound effects animation templates all with just one subscription and with that one subscription you can download as much content as you want which makes it much more affordable than other sites that make you pay per clip
and you don't have to worry because that subscription includes the permission to use all of this media in your own work and in client work so you never have to worry about getting content ided on YouTube if you want to try out story blocks for yourself to make your videos more interesting which I highly recommend you do you can go to the link in the description or go to story blogs.com SL Katie so you should now be ready to go and capture all of the beautiful Boll that you need to make your videos interesting but
filming is one thing and editing is entirely another if you want my best tips for how to edit your videos so that you can keep your viewers watching to the very end which is very important in the YouTube algorithm then you should check out this video next where I dive into all of my best Vlog editing tips as always thank you so much for watching I hope that you're having adventures and following your dreams and I'll catch you in the next video bye
