Free media sources on the web:
SOUND
-The long-running best site for free sound clips of all varieties is
FreeSound.org. They ask that you sign up but it only takes a moment and costs nothing.
-The BBC also offers their enormous
Sound Effects library free for non-comercial usage.
-Free Creative Commons music used to be available via WFMU's FreeMusicArchive for years but it's tragically been acquired by some corporation and is no longer free(!?). However, it looks like a lot of the original FMA material was mirrored on
Archive.org here, and most entries still list their creative commons licenses at the tops of their pages:
-Lots of individual artists have allowed their music to be used freely. High profile examples in the past have been Moby and Nine Inch Nails, and I frequently see this with new producers on Bandcamp as well. Sometimes all it takes is reaching out to ask someone if you can use one of their songs in a non-commercial project.
-
Kevin MacLeod has been posting free stock music online for years, you may already have heard many of these in a youtube video:
VISUAL
-My go-to for vintage public domain film and stock footage is
The Prelinger Archive. -Pexels has a huge archive of free-to-use modern stock video.
-Photo-sharing site
Flickr can be a great place to locate still images that are free to use under various Creative Commons Licenses (you can select Creative Commons type in any search), including completely public domain.
-For instance,
The Library of Congress has uploaded 40,000 photos from their collections.
Sites like FreeSound.org and Archive.org use Creative Commons licenses, which are like more permissive copyrights customized by the creator. There are
many kinds of Creative Commons license. Only
CC0 is fully Public Domain, and most commonly used are
CC BY, which is free to use if you credit the source, are
CC NC, which is free for non-commercial use.