found footage (uncountable)
- (film) Misplaced, forgotten, archived, or privately-owned motion picture recordings which document past events and which are subsequently rediscovered and made available for public viewing.
2006 May 30, Joe Leydon, “One Day In People's Poland”, in Variety, retrieved 16 October 2012:Shrewdly mixing found footage, historical record and dramatized re-creation, One Day in People's Poland is an intriguing curio.
2009 December 1, Manohla Dargis, “Movie Review: Film ist a Girl & a Gun (2009)”, in New York Times, retrieved 16 October 2012:Austrian director Gustav Deutsch complicates this witty, deceptively simple formula with a wealth of found footage (material shot by others for other purposes) borrowed from film archives from around the world.
- (film) A motion picture, or a segment of one, photographed in the style of an amateurish or unedited documentary.
2009 October 10, Richard Corliss, “Paranormal Activity: A Horror Phenomenon”, in Time:Yes, they knew it was only a movie—one that, like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and plenty others before it, used "found footage" to give a patina of realism to the fanciful events.