"Wouldn't it be great if people who created church videos would be willing to share them?" commented a man at a newly formed committee for church communications. When the comment was passed on to me, I responded that many people have already done that and here are some of the resources I passed on.
This first site is primarily a subscription site, but each week has free images and a monthly free video:
https://www.lightstock.com/ really good images and video footage, sign up for their weekly free images and monthly free video
The sites below are all collections either from very large churches or people who contributed—lots of material, challenge is that it takes some time to screen through them—but they are free!
http://creative.newlifechurch.tv/ lots of great materials for free—video loops included
https://seeds.churchonthemove.com/resources/video this link is to the page with videos, but they have lots of other visual resources also
http://resources.elevationchurch.org/ Really an incredible collection of materials, graphics, videos, all for free
The sites below are not free overall, but have weekly items or at random times materials they offer for free if you are on their email list
Last, but one of my favorites:
http://freebibleimages.org/ this is a very different site—all the images are free, some drawings, some (that I think are fascinating) are photographs taken in the Middle East of Bible characters. You can use them in many ways. Once I wanted to do a little video about the prodigal son, so I used their images and put them into animoto
This is a little one I did with the free images:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF8cZjmE6d8&index=6&list=PLF12CC86F2FA2FC15
I did this one to encourage church communicators with images from animoto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DACeDpOW0b8&index=3&list=PLF12CC86F2FA2FC15
It doesn't take long to put them into http://www.animoto.com add words and the free music and you have a video! Churches can get a free account with them.
Please share your thoughts, comments, questions!