The Footage Nobody Asked You to Shoot
Episode 6 of 10
Behind the scenes content is nearly free if you plan it, and impossible to fake afterwards.
More on this: brand video production.
Transcript
There’s a category of footage we end up shooting on most jobs that costs almost nothing, gets used more than the film it came from, and almost nobody puts in the brief. It’s the stuff around the edges of the day.
Setting up. The conversation before the interview starts. Somebody laughing at a mistake. Your team doing the actual work rather than presenting it.
People are unreasonably good at spotting the difference between a company describing its values and a company visibly operating. Behind the scenes footage is one of the few things that shows rather than tells, and it works precisely because it isn’t polished.
Which is also why you can’t manufacture it later. Set up a shoot to look candid and everyone can tell. It has to be a byproduct of a day that was happening anyway.
So put it in the brief. That’s all it takes. Ask for a second camera or a phone picking up the room, ask whoever’s directing to grab thirty seconds of setup, and tell your team they’re being filmed and then leave them alone long enough that they forget. We can plan for that. We can’t invent it in the edit.
There’s a version of this that goes wrong, and it’s worth naming because it’s common. A team decides to document everything, films for a month, and ends up with a folder nobody opens. Volume isn’t the point. Three genuinely good clips from a shoot day beat two hundred that nobody has time to watch, and the filtering has to happen while the day is still fresh in someone’s head.
You’ll get a handful of clips that are worth more than the hero video on social, because they look like something a person made rather than something a company approved.
It also solves a problem most marketing teams have and don’t name, which is volume. You need something to post on the weeks when nothing is launching. The hero film covers one moment. The material around it covers a quarter, because there’s no expectation of polish attached to it and therefore no approval cycle. That second part matters more than the first. A rough clip of your team arguing about a colour goes out on Thursday. A finished film goes through three rounds and lands in six weeks.
The one thing that makes it work is being specific about who’s holding the phone. Left as everybody’s job, it’s nobody’s, and you get to the end of the day with nothing. Name a person before the shoot. It doesn’t need to be a crew member and it’s better if it isn’t, because someone from your side knows which faces matter and which conversations are the ones worth catching.
One thing to be careful about. This only works if what’s behind the curtain is worth showing. If the culture is good, show it. If the process is genuinely careful, show that. Behind the scenes content on a team that isn’t enjoying itself reads exactly as it is, and audiences are better at reading that than most marketing departments assume.
It’s a line in the brief, not a budget item. We’d rather be told on the call than asked for it three weeks after the shoot, when the only honest answer is that we didn’t roll on it.
And get the consent question settled on the day, out loud. People wander through the background of behind the scenes footage without ever agreeing to be in your marketing, and finding that out later is how good material ends up unusable. It’s one sentence at the start of the shoot. Say what you’re filming and where it might end up.
We’re Luma Creative, a video production company in San Francisco. If you’ve got something coming up and you want a straight answer on what it takes, we’re at lumacreative.com.