Using video clips in church

Tim — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:25:14 +0000

To use excerpts from videos in church usually requires you to buy a license, which in my humble opinion is ridiculous. Then there is the whole problem with queuing up the DVD to play and finding you’ve got it in the wrong place and instead of showing the desired clip, you show something highly unsuitable for a sensitive congregation! That is until I came across WingClips, a service that offers a huge collection of ready extracted clips from top movies, all ready to go with permission granted for use in church.

WingClips has a searchable database of movie clips that can be used to illustrate a whole range of themes. Clips can be up to 4 minutes in length and can be downloaded in medium or high resolution formats. The medium resolution downloads are free and are adequate to get a point across in a smaller venue. You do have to subscribe to download, but unless you need the higher resolution versions you won’t need the premium service.

All the clips WingClips have sourced can be used “only and solely for the purpose of illustrating sermon messages and/or teachings during free public religious services and/or teaching presentations” – so no need for the video license they keep trying to sell you!

You might think that this means all the clips are from films nobody has heard of. But you would be wrong. I just downloaded a clip from Evan Almighty to use on Sunday, and this week’s featured downloads come from WALL-E.

With the themed index you can quickly locate suitable clips for your message, and you don’t even have to worry about finding and queuing up the clip to play from a DVD.

Visit the WingClips home page

Following the Golden Compass

Tim — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 15:16:24 +0000

Another film for Christians to start shouting about? I haven’t had chance to see the film yet, but I am now grown up enough to ignore the protests. Kim has a helpful post on the growing Christian reaction to the film, on the Faith and Theology blog. His basic stance being that the kind of God that Pullman sets out to destroy in his books and film actually does the church a service!

I must admit to being irritated by the way the film seems to be using some of the Narnia imagery to tell its story. Shame they couldn’t be more creative. I think though we would be better engaging with the film, rather than just boycotting it. Especially if you know God to be other than the wrinkled mortal old man presented in the film.

I suppose there will now be the inevitable endless stream of expensive anti-Compass weaponary (books, study guides, DVDs by clever people etc), like we saw with Da Vinci. Why not just go and see the film with a friend and talk about it afterwards over a coffee. What kind of God do you know?

Others on this:

Living Open Source» Movies

Using video clips in church

Following the Golden Compass