Royalty Free Stock Video

Stock footage: "Just how big is the stock footage industry? No one seems to know, but FOCAL is preparing a questionnaire for its members in order to find out. The number is likely to be huge.

Take one low-budget documentary, for example: 2004's 'In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed,' which recently aired on TBN and was made for $1 million. About $150,000 of the budget went toward the licensing of stock footage.

'There's some absolutely amazing stuff out there, but it can get crazy expensive real quick if you don't know what you're doing,' 'Face of Evil' director Stephen K. Bannon says.

Bannon adds that, whenever he could, he used free footage from the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress and the archives of the old Soviet Union's KGB secret police and intelligence agency, as well as other outlets.

In doing so, however, he made compromises: Gone was video of President John F. Kennedy smoking a cigar during his inauguration party, and in was free footage of the president and wife Jacqueline walking into the party. Gone was a pristine version of 1964's famed antiwar 'Daisy' ad in favor of a lesser-quality version that was in the public domain.

And gone were clips from half a dozen of Ronald Reagan's movies, which would have cost Bannon and co-director/executive producer Tim Watkins $10,000 per film. Instead, they settled for shots of the movie posters for $500 apiece."

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