Footage
Related: film - film montage
Case studies: Bruce Conner (1933 - ) and found footage - The Movie Orgy (1968) - Joe Dante
Stock footage
Stock footage are films either in the public domain or available for a set fee that can thus be put into any other film. Stock footage is of great use to filmmakers as it is generally far cheaper than actually filming a needed scene. The great difficulty is that it cannot be altered and thus cannot contain the same actors as the rest of the film, and often is not even in the same style. This is not a great problem in documentaries, which thus tend to make use of large amounts of stock footage.It is far harder to integrate stock footage into fictional works, however, and only the lowest budget films usually make use of it. Ed Wood is especially noted for incorporating large amounts of often ill fitting stock footage into his films. Student films also make frequent use of it. Stock footage is most frequently used for establishing shots, where actors are not needed, and also some of the most expensive shots. Stock footage can also be used to integrate news footage or notable figures into a film. For instance, the film Contact included stock footage of press conference by President Bill Clinton.
The largest producer of public domain stock footage is the United States government. All videos produced by the United States military, NASA, and other agencies are available for use as stock footage. There are a number of companies that own the copyrights to large libraries of stock footage and charge film makers a fee for using it, but they rarely demand royalties. Stock footage comes from a myriad of sources, assorted governments, other movies, and often news outlets.
Television and movies series also often use stock footage taken from previous installments. For instance, all the Star Trek series kept a collection of shots of starships that would appear on a regular basis, being used most of the time a ship was seen.
News programmes use film footage from their archives often when more recent images are not available. This is normally termed file footage and is so marked when it is shown. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_footage [Nov 2004]
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