When my friend told me today about Red Ferris Wheel, I almost plucked my eyeball out in sheer excitement. Zach Fonville has provided us with a host of free still images and motion backgrounds. It is a HUGE collection! Download them now for your worship environments!
Simply Youth Ministry, a dynamic student ministry company, has a lot of freebies on their site. Many of them can be used in CM. Have fun!
This one is for the techie’s out there. Go to 5am Productions if you would like to get a few quality loops for worship or countdown backgrounds. When you download the zipped file, you get about 100 .jpg images. You’ll need to import those images into a program like Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premier, Cyberlink Power Director, or iMovie, set the .jpg images to go for a duration of about 1/30th of a second (30 frames per second), and then publish it as a .wmv, .mov, or .mpg file. Not too complicated, huh???
Open Church Resources is a budding blog with logos, motion backgrounds, videos, sermons, graphics, and invite cards. You can probably find a few handy things on their site.
I found a very nice child dedication video here. (scroll to the bottom).
Don’t forget to get your name in the raffle for free Leadership CD’s featuring Jim Wideman!
Recently, I commented on a site called Stock Exchange, but that site is more for folks who need some good backgrounds or images to make their own promotional material. I’d like to take a moment to tell you about another site which has a host of pre-made graphics and images that you can use for your ministry. It is called CreativeMYK. It hosts a huge bank of free Christian themed photos and professionally done graphics. You can check out their gallery here.
When you view their gallery, you see the most recent graphics first. They have a good search engine that allows you to search by file type or keyword. Although the file types vary (.ai, .psd, .eps), there are 22 pages full of jpeg images. Those of you not having access to a $600 piece of software like Adobe Illustrator will find this useful! However, you can open most .eps files in a program called The Gimp. There is also a trick to opening .ai files in The Gimp, that only works part of the time. Anyway, check out the gallery and see if there would be a graphic that would help bring some personality to your next Children’s Worship series.
Are you still stuck using Microsoft Word clip art for your next big Children’s Ministry event? Or are you really doing it the old school way by taping pictures from those 1980′s clip art catalogs? Well toss your clip art out the door and start using quality graphics from Stock.xchng. Everything on their site is high quality and absolutely free. You do have to set up a free account with them in order to download the graphics. They have mostly picture images, but are growing in their number of digital graphics as well. Here is what the website allows you to use images for:
All Images on the Website are copyrighted and they are the properties of SXC or its Image providers. All rights are reserved unless otherwise granted to You. Your rights to use the Image are subject to this agreement and the restrictions specified at each Image.
We hereby grant to You a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the Image on the terms and conditions explained in this Agreement and on the Image preview page FREE OF CHARGE.
You may use the Image
Here are a few logos/posters I have done using background images from this site. Click on the image if you would like to see the whole thing.
I did these in either Publisher or Inkscape
