Little Jesus Freaks is a website for parents that provides reviews on DVD and Blu Ray releases, books, and other parental resources. It also offers recipes, commentary on everyday parenting experiences, and press releases pertinent to resources and announcements that are beneficial to parents.

For those of you wanting information on a little bit more mature level, you can get a ton of reviews and be in the know on the latest Christian film and music through Jesus Freak Hideout. Movie reviews include a parental guide much like Plugged In Online’s content. Jesus Freak Hideout also has ongoing contests for free music and special meetings with artists. You can also check out their free music section.

Check out The Church Ninja for free resources each Friday. The Church Ninja also points to other media items that you can purchase at various websites and has it’s own store opening soon! Looking forward to more resources to come out from my new Ninja friend!

VideoBlocks.com is the first subscription-based resource for royalty free stock footage, sound effects, special effects and looping motion backgrounds. You can get a free 7 day subscription that allows you to download 20 HD clips per day for 7 days. They have a huge assortment of backgrounds for worship lyrics or you may find it helpful for stock footage for your VBS or camp theme. If you don’t want to pay, just cancel it on day 7 and you can have 140 free clips.

If you want to get more involved in movie/video production for your ministry and:

a. Have Window’s Vista (which did not include a Movie Maker), or

b. Have Windows XP Pro as an office OS (which does not include a Movie Maker), or

c. Have Windows 7 which includes Windows Live Movie Maker that pretty much stinks, or

d. Want a nicer video editor, but don’t want to spend the $80-100 to get it, then

I’ve got a few free editors you may want to try:

1. Jaycut–Jaycut is an online editor. It has some nice features including multiple audio channels, text effects, and tons of transition effects.

2. MovieMasher–MovieMasher is a great downloadable program that includes a ton of nice transition effects as well as chroma-key incorporation (green screen).

3. Lightworks–This is not for the faint of heart. Lightworks is a Hollywood level movie editing software available for free download. This is a hefty package, but very powerful…more fitting for the tech-savvy of the kidmin world.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the incredible resources that Lifechurch makes available for absolutely free. Well, I just learned that in addition to their kids and student curriculum, they also have a good deal of worship loops for download. You know they will be quality, because Lifechurch is quality. Enjoy!

I came across this site the other day and noticed that it had a few Christmas and Easter lessons as well as some generic Bible teaching videos that you could download. Some of the links lead you to other places, but some are on the site. Here’s the catch…to get the stuff from their site, you have to register your email address.

Do you have a staff team you work with or a volunteer team that works closely in ministry together? You may want to consider attending this free online conference to develop healthy church teams. If you are not familiar with Leadership Network, they are an organization that helps church leaders innovate in their context through publications, online content and events.

Register for this free online conference here.

I came across this great post the other day from Jesse Gardner about video production/broadcast on a shoestring budget. They talk about a few resources that I have mentioned here at Free CM Stuff and showed how those can be integrated well into producing video content and making available to your people. In regard to children’s ministry, I see this as beneficial to:

1. Recording your kids worship services and broadcasting them the next week for children who missed
2. Recording trainings for volunteers to watch as a catch up or in the case of ongoing training for the future
3. Highlighting and promoting videos that celebrate a certain event after it happened (camps, VBS, retreats, etc.)

What other ways do you see this could be beneficial to children’s ministry?

I hope you have found the benefits of Vimeo to your ministry. Many people have uploaded some quality videos that can be used for your ministry including short films, countdowns and motion graphics. Now, they have added a component called a video school.The video school is full of some great beginner to advanced tutorials about filming, production, sound, effects and editing. You can also check out Videopedia for more video insight.

It is so cheap to produce your own in house videos today. $1000 can easily buy all you need to (sans computer) to record and edit near professional quality videos. See my first effort at this here.

Well I’ve been pretty busy, but it is time for the work of Free CM Stuff to return! The Lord has led us to a church ministry in Georgia, away from our friends in NC! However, the work of the gospel is going strong at Ingleside Baptist and we are excited to be a part of it. I have taken the position there as the Children’s Pastor in charge of elementary ministries. I’m also stoked at the awesome stuff the Lord is doing at my old church in NC.

Today, I wanted to tell you about a handy video tool called Squared 5. It is a free download that lets you convert and edit various types of video files as well as download videos from Google or Youtube with a URL. Hope it can help!