Tag Archives: youtube

Stock Footage: We Got That B-Roll!

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This video was introduced to me at SXSW this year. It’s not a viral ad by a stock media company (which would have been uber-clever), but rather a sketch by a sketch-comedy troupe. I thought it was hilarious — pretty much sums up the stock footage marketplace.

I should note however, that most of the footage, just because it is stock footage, isn’t just cheap B-Roll. Productiontrax (and several other sites as well) has a large library of incredibly usefull, high-quality, thoughtful, and well produced footage. The video clips range from high-tech animations that would fit into any sci-fi film to useful charts and graphs, to yes, B-roll footage of sad guy leaning against a wall.

I think stock media serves a useful purpose in media production. All joking aside, stock footage increases our productivity and frees us up to be even more creative, if you can follow that — the footage by itself is overused and mundane, but it keeps getting used in new, and innovative ways. Don’t let the B-roll label throw you, or keep you from being innovative in how you use stock footage — just remember it’s a tool in your editor’s bag of tricks to help you get your job done, and tell the story in new and interesting ways.

Oh, here’s the video (the owners didn’t want it embedded) — http://youtu.be/SItFvB0Upb8

Stock Music for Befuddled Bee

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Using a combination of ToonBoom Studio 6, Audacity, iMovie,and GarageBand, Yootoon Studios created a fun animated short about a bee who has a moment of uncertainty as he steps out of his hive. To add to the fun and to create a matching soundtrack to highlight the story and give life to their animated character, the folks at Yootoon Studios utilized a stock music track from Productiontrax.com and incorporated it into the one-minute film’s soundtrack.

Baxter Bee – Befuddled Bee uses a piece called The Cue, with music composed, arranged & produced by Thomas Bukket, licensed for commercial use – track ID 5143. It’s a jolly, light-hearted, dixieland piece that is perfect for children’s projects and animated shorts like this one.

Yootoon Studios is cartoon creator Butch Hartman’s new animation channel, with new episodes on YouTube every Wednesday at 12PM. You can even submit your own stuff.

Sound Effects and Cue Sheets

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Because of the lack of education in the film production community about cue sheets, we get a constant flow of questions about cue sheet filings. This post’s question is about sound effects.

Question: We purchased some audio sound effects from Productiontrax.com recently, and are filing cue sheets. Do we need to include every sound file we used on the cue sheet? How do we do this?

You can breathe a sigh of relief, because this one has an easy answer: no. Sound effects are not entered on cue sheets (unless it’s a bona fide musical composition).

There’s a technical copyright-law-legalese explanation for why that is, but basically, one can’t stake a claim to the underlying intellectual property of a fart or a honk or a quack or a bark or a… you get the idea. While the actual sound recording is copyrighted, and yes, you need to license it, there is no public performance right associated to it, and therefore, there is no need to track it.

As briefly mentioned, however, the one exception is when a sound effect contains a musical composition. For example, a sound effect of someone playing or singing Happy Birthday would need to be reported on a cue sheet. Why? Because the song Happy Birthday is under copyright (yes it is) and has public performance rights and royalties attached to it.

Hopefully, this should come as a relief to all of you out there who like to throw a million sound effects into a single production project — like we did in our YouTube video. Leave the sound effects off your cue sheets (in fact, our automated cue sheet tool will not even let them be entered) — and sit back and enjoy the fruits of you labor for once.

Royalty Free Music for Book Trailers

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When Laura Elliot, an author of young adult and middle grade fiction, needed royalty free music for the trailers for her latest novels, she turned to Productiontrax.com for her stock media, helping her to promote her books online.

For her first trailer, she featured her book Winnemucca, a small-town fairy tale, about a seventeen-year old girl who solves the riddle of her past on an enchanted road trip where fear’s as blind as love, using Mariachi Music Soundtrack from Productiontrax.

For 13 on Halloween, book 1 in the coming-of-age fantasy series explores popularity and what it means to have it all, she turned to royalty free music from Productiontrax to complete her soundtrack.

Elliot’s upcoming release: “I’m currently in production on a third book trailer for my latest release Transfer Student, a freaky-Friday young-adult scifi romance adventure about a Beverly Hills surfer girl who swaps lives with a boy geek alien when his teleporting telescope experiment goes bad. They swap lives and learn about their dreams by surviving their nightmares.”

Find out more at http://laurasmagicday.wordpress.com/