I did my search on the concept of nature and darkness, and used google to search for Creative Commons images, videos, and audio tracks that fit with that idea.
Photos were the easiest to find in quantity, though I had to search through them for quality. I noticed on the Creative Commons Search particularly that many of the pictures have watermarks on them. I tried to find a download option around it, as well as visiting the site it was taken from, but didn’t have much luck. I did, however, find one beautiful image that I may have to fight with some more to see if I can find it without the watermarks. Excluding the watermarks, there are some really beautiful pictures featured on the Creative Commons Search.
I also had a lot of luck finding instrumental audio tracks that could be used in the back of films. Particularly, I found dig.ccmixter very helpful. It offers downloadable tracks from the creative commons that can be used as long as the artist is given credit for their work.
What I had the most trouble finding in the Creative Commons was videos. Most of the videos I found were homemade (such as those on Flickr) and had bad or shaky picture quality. When looking at professional or better quality clips that came from real films, I found that most of my searches yielded black and white videos, since those videos were old enough that their license had expired. In general, it seems that videos are more likely to be licensed and less likely to be opened for remix and reuse.
When thinking of the creative commons’ affordances on larger, more general scale, I agree with Jordyn that “some of the limitations stem from the initial search option.” The biggest limitation of the creative commons media is how spread out it is. There’s no one search tool that will allow you to go through the material. As such, finding the media you will work from is very time consuming, and involves jumping across many searches and platforms. One resource I found listed 120+ Places to Find Creative Commons Media.
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