We have often dreamt of the vast archives of footage sitting in the vaults of TV stations around the world. We imagine it to be something like the warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones and The Raiders of The Lost Ark, but instead of religious relics, there are hundreds of thousands of hours of footage – everything from outer space to the sub atomic realm, from historical moments caught on tape to the vast archive of sound effects and voice recordings. If only, we wondered, what could you do with all that material? Since April this year the BBC under the Creative Archive agreement has started to release copyright and royalty free sound and image from its archives to the public to use in any way you want.
Now commercial archives are getting in on the act. Getty Images, the US-based commercial photography and video clip company, are offering a US$10,000 prize for people who can propose a project that will use a “minimum of 50%” of Getty Images stills or film clips. The theme for the competition is “the big idea” – what’s your big idea about creativity? The only draw back is that entries close this Thursday, November 10. Get cracking.
For those of you who are more interested in creating from scratch rather than just, you know, stealing other people’s work, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are getting ready to accept pitches for new arts documentaries. The Arts and Entertainment Department of ABC TV will finance the development of a documentary project to the value of AUD $10,000 in their annual pitching competition during the Australian International Documentary Conference 2006. That’s $10,000 to write a script. Sure, you need an idea first, but that shouldn’t be too hard. You can download the application form in PDF form.
Blogger recently introduced a search facility on its home page so you can now search the web for blogs by subject. Type in “art” and you’ll get a huge list of blogs. By coincidence, The Art Life comes up pretty close to the top of the list [and we’re assuming it’s because we have ‘art’ in our name]. We mention this because we have started receiving emails from bloggers around the world asking for reciprocal links and the occasional offer from commercial web sites. Most of the commercial sites aren’t worth bothering with but we recently got an email from the marketing manager of Site Kreator. The company offers users a free web site where you choose a web site template from a list and then fill it up with your content. They host up to 10MBs for free. If you have more than 10MBs, Site Kreator will upgrade your account [for a fee] to bigger, better and flashier templates with more options for content.
As a deal to Art Life readers, Site Kreator has offered to upgrade new sites to 100MBs free of charge. The only catch [as far as we are aware] is that you need to log in to your account once every six months. Accoding to the marketing manager who worte to us, there are no fees to pay if you keep your site below 100MB. Check out Photographer, Mike White, Bryan Drum and Darkworlds for examples of sites made from the templates. We thought that some of our readers might like to get in on the whole artist web site thing and Site Kreator seemed like a pretty good offer to us. We can’t see any loopholes and since they’re not asking you to pay anything… so why not? Go to Site Kreator, sign up, then email us and we’ll send you the 100MB upgrade key.
