I Spend Too Much Time With Stock Footage
The nonsequiturs abound, the representation not so much.
As a video editor, I work with stock footage a lot. For those of you who don’t know, stock footage archives are databases where you can find, for purchase, photographs and video clips to use to illustrate a video. This includes tons of material from press outlets depicting actual people and events, and also people “acting” out various scenarios, to fit virtually any situation that you might need to illustrate in a video. I say “acting” because most of the people doing this are not actors, and so tend to turn in ridiculously over-the-top performances. Though, to be fair, they are also often asked to do things that are pretty unnatural and that they don’t understand, like get emotional over an orange,
or dance on a bridge in a mime costume,
or in slow-mo in a moodily-lit set in a unicorn mask.
Surprisingly, or not, there are actually a lot of videos of the person in the unicorn mask in a variety of situations.
And just for fun, here are two of my favorite things that come up when you just type “weird” into the search bar.
The names of these clips are basically just a chopped salad of keywords, such as “Doll Looks At Orange Retro Lava Lamp, Creating A Moody, Weird Background,” and “The Man In The Mask Much The Unicorn Shakes His Head,” but “Funny Weird Alien Cyclops Disco Loop Animation,” does show that the person writing the list of keywords preferred “disco” to simply “dance” or “headbanging.” As someone who edits a lot of videos about implicit bias, which contain studies about how people tend to misread facial expressions of people who are different from them, particularly white people perceiving Black people as angry when they are not, it’s hard not to see some of these choices as revealing particular assumptions. Like if you search for “angry portrait,” you get this group of people
maybe one or two of which I might construe as angry, but gee, there’s something that they all aren’t that I just can’t put my finger on, gosh, what could it be…
Now, you can make some good stuff out of stock news footage and photos, like this video I made in 2019 for a group trying to get people to pay attention to their biases against female candidates.
And you can make good stuff out of the “creative” archives too, if you are both creative and selective. I was able to find some okay stuff with this video explainer about Defunding the Police, which I think is actually pretty darn good even with my temp VO, but never got anyone to sponsor it because moderate Democrats decided to run away from the concept at top speed screaming “BLASPHEMY!” when the pandemic caused a brief spike in crime.
But the most common uses of stock footage and images tend to be poorly-designed web sites, fake news stories, and corporate training videos, for which people really don’t care about performances all that much (or, in the case of The Onion, hilarity is exactly what they’re looking for). The training videos are what I work on most, and they are why you will find a LOT of office footage that is comprised of variations on a basic theme with different types of people, like the Group Contemplating A Laptop.
The kids are obviously giving the best performance here.
Or one of my personal favorites, Writing On A Glass Wall As If This Is Something People In Offices Actually Do.
Let’s move the post-it notes.
Let’s get really excited about the post-it notes.
Now let’s all write on the post-it notes!
It’s so popular, that you also see it in medical and science settings.
Doctors and scientists don’t use post-its, obvi.
Also popular are certain gestures, like Folding Arms To Look Badass,
or its cousin, Folding Arms to Look Badass, But Also Happy, Like People You Want To Work With.
But at least you can find some version of these office folks who look plausible in various situations, even if those situations are dumb. And, because I edit a lot of videos designed to teach people in different work environments about implicit bias, I know that you can even find a fair amount of diversity in terms of race and gender, and sometimes groups of just one type, although that is definitely harder. For instance, you can find groups of Asian office workers without too much trouble, maybe because these were filmed in an Asian country, but you’ll have a hard time finding more than two or three Black office workers alone together, probably because white people find that scary. And any type of crossover is particularly hard. There are Black disabled workers, but the pickings are slim. And for some reason, all of the Asian disabled people look like they are getting fired.
It’s also hard to find women taking on uncommon roles, like as construction workers, and when you do find them, you find some of the worst performances of all.
If you’re starting to think there is a lot of stock footage of people dancing in weird situations, you are correct.
Because hand gestures make it look like you know what you’re doing.
But luckily, you can also find those terrible performances on green screen.
Or as a silhouette.
Or an animated line drawing.
Pretty clearly a character in Debbie Does Construction rather than an actual construction worker.
Speaking of animation, there are a lot of cartoons with all sorts of variations on a particular action, like these, which are supposed to express human hunger, but…I dunno.
In case you didn’t catch that, Santa is drooling at the end there.
And if you like one particular cartoon, like Caishen, the Taoist god of fortune, you can find him doing all sorts of stuff that is unintelligible.
But at least these make more sense than why anyone would use this animation for branding their company.
Maybe the caption would be, “Yeehaw, Bitcoin!”
Putting in a background does not help.
Did they think it through when they decided to make his tie translucent?
But it is improved, as with all things in life, when you add backup dancers.
I will say the dance moves seem authentic to this demographic.
And speaking of representation (which we were, remember? Before we went down the rabbit hole that took us to digital clone construction workers dancing?), don’t even get me started on what comes up when you search for people at work who are overweight, assuming you are hoping to find people who behave in a normal way.
At least this one
is better than this one.
Or trans or non-binary folks.
I’m afraid to even ask what the subtext is supposed to be here.
What you will find the most when you do that search is footage of trans people putting on make-up — because clearly, this is what fascinates the straight male DPs who film this stuff
I will say, though, that sometimes you will come upon a surprisingly natural piece of footage like this one.
And to be fair, there is also plenty of bad stock footage of cis straight people that has sinister overtones that nobody seemed to notice.
The only possible caption for this is, “Yes, soon I’ll have all of her money and she will be in my freezer…”
I could end this post with something about how stock footage reflects a lot of what’s wrong with our society — how corporate it is, and how the lack of diversity in representation perpetuates a lack of diversity in the workplace and a lack of respect for people different from ourselves, who we then make out to be frightening, or freakish, or laughable — all of which is only likely to get worse given the current attack on DIE programs around the country. But I know that’s what you’d expect from me, since I’ve said a lot of that stuff before. So instead, I’m just going to end with this visual expression of how I feel about it.
Indeed you do! Reading this made my head spin!
Hilarious and well done, Betsy! Love the Defund the Police and "check your bias" videos.
Dancing with the mystery logo priceless.