Media professionals are always in great need of innovative material for editorial usage—stills, motion, sound files—and they need it quickly. Often, as we all know (with a sigh) the resources available are beyond our budgets and the available offerings fall short of the creative vision we have.

Increasingly, we are seeing distributors of visual/auditory media introducing Public Domain collections of media. One such new offering is The Public Domain Project over at Pond5.

We took a spin through the collection and found wonderful, eclectic images, clips and music tracks(many with that lovely ‘crack and pop’ of vinyl!), easily searchable. Beware, its a good place to fall down the rabbit hole on a Wednesday morning!

As valuable as the material is for a project, Pond5 has a clear tutorial to lay out guidelines. They cover usage and questions surrounding trademark, releases, copyright. Public Domain, Creative Commons do not always mean free without permissions, attribute and in some cases negotiated usage fees and the onus is on the end user to completely clear rights.

Within the guidelines, much creativity and fun is to be had while telling your story: