How are we defining stock footage? I thought stock footage was filmed specifically for the purpose of being sold as, well, stock footage. For example, last year John Oliver tracked down the sources of the stock footage that was used in an anti-Obamacare ad, licensed the footage, and put together a spoof commercial. Maybe old newsreel-type clips fall under the definition. I would exclude re-used or unused footage from earlier movies - these aren’t available on the open market.
Usually when I think of stock footage I think of airplane taking off/in flight/landing - like in The Godfather when Tom Hagen flies out to L.A. and back. I can’t really come up with anything more recent than maybe L.A. Confidential - the opening travelogue looks like is could have been assembled with stock footage.
I think The Giant Claw took this to the extreme. There are stock shots, set shots and FX shots (for certain very loose values of ‘FX’) of planes that hardly even match in having two wings each.
(There’s a hilarious FX of a plane crash where the wires on the model snag for a second, just before the model hits the ground.)
Here’s an unusual reverse of this. In Hope and Glory (1987) there’s a scene where the characters are watching a newsreel of the RAF fighting the Luftwaffe. You’d figure John Boorman would have just used an old newsreel for the scene. But no; he took footage from The Battle Of Britain (1969) and altered it so it would look like an old newsreel.
Does any movie or TV show showing the main booster separation from an Apollo launch count? It wasn’t sold as stock footage per se, but offered by NASA (presumably). I’ve seen that scene in so many things, it’s almost a cliche.
In *Dark Blue World *they used a lot of footage from* The Battle of Britain*, but cleaned up and with aircraft added ore removed digitally to fit the story.
Another entry from the “newsreel/montage” angle: 2004’s Dawn of the Dead contains a number of clips of riots, disasters, civil disturbances, etc. mixed with sundry other stock and a bit of new footage to represent the beginning of a zombie plague outbreak. Beautifully.
Oliver Stone’s Nixon included a fair amount of stock footage (Vietnam war scenes, student riots, etc.). Coincidentally, that was released in 1995—the same year as Apollo 13.
This one bugs me: in 1995’s Cutthroat Island, as the characters are about to go to Port Royal, the movie shows an establishing shot of the island. The footage is notably grainier than and colored differently from the rest of the movie. It looks like they yanked it from a 1960s tourism film. I find it jarring.
And yes, I like Cutthroat Island, that’s not the issue here.
That brings up an interesting point—in the old days, it was easy to spot stock footage because it looked so different. In The Man from UNCLE, there’d always be a grainy stock shot of some foreign locale before cutting to Solo and Kuryakin walking through a weirdly underpopulated airport set or backlot street.
Perhaps we don’t notice stock footage so much in current films because the overall quality of stock has gotten better with the advent of high-definition digital cameras. Whenever there’s a shot of a passenger airplane landing, I would assume it’s stock—would even a big-budget production spend the money to send a second-unit crew to the airport?
The opening to The Search for Spock used a lot of the closing scenes from Wrath of Khan, simply changing them to black and white.
I didn’t even think it was that special looking in The Undiscovered Country, just some fake looking explosions superimposed over the Bird of Prey and then a plastic model being blasted by too big a pyrotechnic device.
Got a closer one, Edge of Tomorrow (AKA Live, Die, Repeat) from 2014 used stock footage of that famous 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor over Russia in order to simulate an alien attack at the beginning.