Templates & Examples
Books
e-Books
Infographics
Infographics Images (for ideas)
15 Free Infographics Templates (in PowerPoint)
Displays & Exhibits
FotoMagico is the easiest way to create gorgeous slideshows on your Mac using your photos, videos, music, and text. Work with pre-built stories, story parts, or tell your very own, unique story.
PowerPoint & Keynote
Tutorials
Lynda.com is a huge collection of online courses that you can take at your own speed and on your own time. They cover every imaginable creative discipline, software, and digital skill.
Adobe, the maker of Photoshop, Acrobat, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and more, offers free online instruction and tutorials for all of its software.
For Apple, there are various tutorials on YouTube. Lynda.com’s tutorials, however, are the gold standard and are recommended by Apple.
MasterClass is an online source of master classes with some of the most famous names in their respective fields. Ken Burns and documentary filmmaking, Annie Leibovitz and photography, Martin Scorsese and filmmaking, and many more. These classes are paid but very possibly worth the modest cost given the depth of the courses and the expertise of the teachers. (Blake subscribes to MasterClass.)
Music & Photos
Unsplash, a Canadian site, offers a huge collection of beautiful, free photos, gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers. Free to use, but please remember to credit the photographers!
SmartSound is music-creation software. Extremely powerful and endlessly customizable, you can create royalty-free music for any kind of project. You can sign up for the SmartSound Free Royalty Free Music for Schools program. They offer free music for schools, student projects, and personal use. They also offer a wide range of online tutorials in the use of the software’s powerful tools.
Video
There are really no tutorials for making videos: the subject is too large and complex. What most filmmakers will suggest is this: watch and study as many examples as you can. Get an understanding of how others do what you’re trying to do too. Collect ideas and create something new of your own. Here are a few places to start:
Sandwich Video makes videos and commercials, mostly for neat tech products. But look at their “reels” and you’ll be inspired at how much can be communicated in a very short video.
Here are five great short videos from 2016 that will both inspire and motivate you.
Great shorts: The lineup of short films and video played at TEDGlobal 2017.
Shape of You
This excellent and inventive video tells the story of Ed Sheeran and his collaborators creating the hit track. (Creativity is all about building something one step at a time!)
Influenza 1918 on PBS
This is a 1998 American Experience documentary on the Spanish flu pandemic told from an American perspective.
The Old New World
A remarkable photo-based animation project that uses old photographs and creates animation within them.
Welcome Home
Spike Jonze’s four-minute video for the Apple HomePod is a great example of (nearly) wordless, highly cinematic, and concentrated storytelling. This article breaks the video’s structure down so you can see how it’s been put together.
Designed by Apple
A short video narrated by Apple’s design chief, Jony Ive, that profiles the design team at Apple. A simple and beautiful example of compact storytelling.
Animation
Animation is an extremely complicated medium in which to work. It is beyond the scope of this project to provide any meaningful tutorials or resources. However, this video on YouTube – 5 Types of Animation – is a short (eight minute) introduction to the main types of animation and how each of them work.
If animation is your medium of choice, we strongly recommend that you identify what kind of animation you would like to pursue, and then research what tools and experience will be necessary to create your project.
Animation has been a historically expensive medium – first, heavily dependent on the meticulous work of animation artists, and more recently on prohibitively expensive software and computer hardware necessary to bring one’s animated project to life. Increasingly, there are online resources that make animation more accessible to the individual. For that reason, we again encourage you to explore the types of animation and how to accomplish your objectives within the limits of your resources.