News footage shows up in all sorts of media. Of course, it's almost impossible to make a documentary about a 20th-century subject without it.
But even narrative projects can use news footage for creating context (the opening of The Departed is a great example), and licensing it has long been something filmmakers have had to budget and plan properly for.
Pond5 has just announced its new "Editorial" platform which should make that process easier, bringing together traditional news from Reuters, content from citizen newsgatherers from Newsflare, and even celebrity news from Cover Video all under the Pond5 umbrella.
While all the collections are exciting, and for certain projects, the celebrity clips in Cover will be vital, Reuters is really the huge news in this story since traditional news has always been very saavy about understanding the value of what they offer.
News archives are seldom affordable on indie film budgets, which can make for a tremendous amount of research and creativity needed when building a documentary. It's not uncommon to see archival shots switched out from one source or another, from one vendor to another (if multiple sources had cameras at an event, for instance), or to other events entirely, even well after picture lock, once final licensing is taken into account.
Add on top of that the other work Pond5 does to make things easier for filmmakers, including a very slick Premiere Pro plugin and an AI assisted search. The job of managing stock media in your project is getting easier and easier.
Source: Pond5
