Are Your Outtakes a Hidden Gold Mine? Here's What's in Demand in Stock Footage

You've finished your project, honing your footage down to the essentials. But was everything you left on the cutting room floor an absolute waste? From a creative standpoint, certainly not, as each cut brought you closer to the best version of your film. But from a financial perspective, you may want to recoup some of the money spent on footage that never made it into the final cut.

To find out if your unused footage is in demand, let's take a look at five of the hottest trends in stock footage requests from a recently released report from Storyblocks (formerly VideoBlocks) based on 64 million searches and 38 million downloads from its website over the past year.

According to the Storyblocks report, searches for "LGBT" were up 782% on its site in 2017.

1. Diversity is in demand

Content creators ramped up their requests for footage and images featuring a diverse array of people to match the world around us. According to the Storyblocks report, searches for "LGBT" were up 782% on its site in 2017 (yes, almost eight times as much as the year prior). Storyblocks also witnessed a 27% uptick in searches for "diverse" and a 21% increase in searches for "women".

2. Show us real people in authentic situations

If you have reels and reels of unused B-roll featuring everyday people in real-life situations, particularly in cities, you are in luck. Searches for "authentic" were up 134% while requests for "real people" increased 58%. The demand for "cities" was up a whopping 1,285% year over year. If your discarded B-roll includes all of three of these elements, you may find that you are sitting on a major untapped financial resource.

Credit: Storyblocks

3. Look to the stars

If your thing is timelapse video of the starry night sky, we've got good news for you. Storyblocks discovered that searches for "space" among video requests were up 136% compared to last year. Want to make timelapse videos of the starry night sky your thing? Learn how to make some memorable ones.

4. Make it cinematic

This is really a no-brainer, but cinematic images are going to raise the quality level of any project. So, we are certainly not surprised to discover that searches for "cinematic" footage on Storyblocks were up 315% year over year. That means the amazing visual transition shot that you just couldn't fit into your final project can find a new life in someone else's project (or lots of other people's projects).

Credit: Storyblocks

5. Slow it down

In addition to searching for cinematic images, customers are also looking for footage that warps time. Storyblocks noticed an increase of 23% in searches for "slow-motion" footage. So while you're putting together your cinematic footage of diverse people in authentic city settings, you may want to check and see if some of that additional footage was shot at a higher frame rate to take advantage of this trend.

Got some footage you would like to sell on Storyblocks? The company pays contributors 100% commissions on all sales, passing through the total amount of each purchase to the content creators because of the company's subscription revenue model for customers. Learn more about becoming a contributor on the Storyblocks website.

Want more creative ways to get the most out of your unused footage? Check out some of our other recommendations here.

Featured image from Storyblocks.

Source: Storyblocks