Creative Archive Licence Group

I’ll admit there aren’t many advantages to being British. There’s the lack of country name on stamps which I assume saves a second or so in reading time when you post a letter. There’s also the Creative Archive Licence Group, which looks like an excellent thing – if you’re British.

I found this from the BBC site. The BBC are plugging it because they’ve released about 80 news clips for use under the Creative Archive Licence. You can browse the clips at the News Online site. By itself 80 clips of fairly recent television news wouldn’t be that exciting. What makes it so is that it’s part of a wider initiative.

[FLASH]http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/provenancedesign/hamlet.swf, 400, 320[/FLASH]Silent Hamlet (Act II Scene I). 1913. Dir. Hay Plumb. From the BFI Creative Archive

The British Film Institute has also signed up with a variety of clips. You can download the classic silent version of Hamlet filmed in Devon in MPEG-1. This is where it starts getting more exciting, because these clips are editable and can be used in presentations and so on, or converted to SWF like the above clip for the web. Coming in the New Year will be additions from the Open University and Teachers’ TV.

Channel 4 is also signed up and their site 4docs looks particularly interesting. It’s not just the prospect of clips that makes the Channel 4 site worth watching, or even the possibility to upload your own documentaries. It’s also the fact that there are guides on how to make a documentary. That’s brilliant because there’s more to making a film than throwing some images at a camera and seeing what sticks. The only annoyance I’ve got is that I’m simply too busy at the moment and I can’t afford to get distracted.

Nevertheless the presentation possibilities are huge. With movies embedded into PowerPoint presentations you can make hybrid talks which get the best out of audiovisual media but also allow for the interactivity of a typical presentation.

But as I mentioned at the start, the Creative Archive Licence only applies to British citizens.