Last term some of our students were working on movie trailers with a colleague.  A perfect opportunity to introduce ideas about open source, creative commons, or royalty free image and music for use by  schools. There are a number of strategies that teachers should be familiar with – time to make a nice list!

I was pleased to get a ‘heads up’ from Barry Starlin about Soundzabound. Just in time for our next batch of movie work.

Here’s what the site tells us:

Soundzabound Royalty Free Music supersedes Fair Use in that we fully license the music with unlimited rights for education and sign off that you are protected. Fair Use has limitations in use and states the you are liable should there be a claim. Soundzabound also provides the solutions for:

• Education Approved Content in a searchable database
• Artist branding rights not covered under Fair Use
• User statistic reports
• Web-based interface formatted for all your production purposes

What this tells me is that it is safe to let students jump onto the site and grab what they need to enliven their productions. Soundzabound shows how their sites works, and the multitude of contexts that sound bites can be used in.

This is where the site comes into its own. The movie trailers our students made could not be put onto the web safely – fair use didn’t cover publication of the end products on Youtube.  Had the students used files from Soundzaboud we could have shared their magical creations.

My next move, when the school term starts, is to make available a school list of resources for such productions. Should have done it ages ago – but the time is now right.

Here are some sources  I have already  collected. There will be others I know, so if you have a favourite site, list or collection, and have time please let me know.

Creative Commons and Music