“The Bowl”

Peter McKinnon shares the impact of a single image

Peter McKinnon teamed up with World Vision to tell a story of hope amidst crises. A seemingly mundane photo of a bowl stuck with him more than any other from his trip to Kenya and he used the image in a surprising and powerful way to sum up what he experienced.

As an experienced storyteller, Peter knows the importance of sound in making a film come to life with visceral feeling. “Capturing the sound of an environment is an absolute must for me. Hearing something distinct and specific to a place, time, or person can really draw you right back,” he said.

To supplement the audio he captured on location, Peter used a few sounds from our Archetype SFX library throughout the film.

“Accentuating my story with proper SFX really helped tie the project together and give it that seamless flow I was looking for. They often say if it looks bad, people will still watch. If it sounds bad, they won’t,” he added.See more of Peters’s work on his Youtube Channel.

Music

Individual

  • Access to all Music
  • Personal, freelance, and client work
  • Covers social media, websites, and web advertising
  • Monetize on YouTube
  • Pre-clear 5 YouTube channels
  • No SFX, VFX or LUTs
  • No Broadcast or Streaming
$299
/year
Choose Plan
Music & SFX

Individual

  • Access to all Music & Sound Effects
  • Personal, freelance, and client work
  • Covers social media, websites, and web advertising
  • Monetize on YouTube
  • Pre-clear 5 YouTube channels
  • No VFX or LUTs
  • No Broadcast or Streaming
$399
/year
Choose Plan
Best Value
All-Access

Individual

  • Access to all Music & Sound Effects
  • Access to all VFX and LUTs
  • Personal, freelance, and client work
  • Covers social media, websites, and web advertising
  • Monetize on YouTube
  • Pre-clear 5 YouTube channels
  • No Broadcast or Streaming
$599
/year
Choose Plan

General FAQ

No: we price based on the total number of employees of the buying entity (including video and non-video roles), not on the number of users.

The Freelance plan is for freelance work and is exclusively available to a self-employed individual or company with 7 or fewer employees total (including video and non-video roles).

If you are an in-house editor at a brand, agency, or any organization with 8+ employees across all roles, you must purchase a Business plan in order to legally use our assets. Please contact [email protected] for a quote.

Our Freelance plans cover work for external clients with 1,000 or fewer employees. If you work on projects for clients with more than 1,000 employees, you have two options:

  1. If you often have large clients, a Business Plan might be the best fit. Reach out to us via the Business Plans tab.
  2. If you often have large clients, you can get a quote to increase the client size limit on your plan.

Our Freelance plans cover web and social media advertising, YouTube monetization, and film festival submissions. If you need to use our assets in streaming/broadcast ads, streaming/broadcast programming, theatrical releases, or anything else not covered by our Freelance plan license, please get in touch.

Assets must be “synchronized” into a video or podcast project with other media and may not be used on their own. Assets may not be used to create new musical works.

Examples of things you cannot do:

  • Share files or accounts with other people
  • Make music with our assets or sing over our tracks
  • Incorporate our assets into any sort of product or app
  • Upload our assets to Spotify, Apple Music, etc.
  • Upload assets by themselves to YouTube, Facebook, etc.
  • Automatically or excessively download our assets

Please review the full license agreement for full terms.

Yes! Upload to YouTube with confidence! We’ll never mute a Member’s video or have it removed.

Our assets are registered with YouTube’s Content ID system and YouTube will notify you that it has detected copyrighted music in your video. But don’t worry: this has no negative effect on your video or channel.

If you want to monetize your channel, simply connect your YouTube channel to your Lens Distortions account to pre-clear the channel for use with our assets.

Alternatively, you can create singe-use license codes to include when uploading your video in lieu of registering your channel. This option is great for clients you don’t work with on an ongoing basis.

Rest assured, videos cleared while your membership is active remain cleared forever.

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, etc are already cleared and do not currently require you to register your account or use License Codes.

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No: we only offer annual plans. We’re focused on long-term relationships with customers who benefit from year-round access to world-class assets. While our annual plans are a larger investment up-front, they pay for themselves with only a few projects.

Yes! You can upgrade to a higher plan at any time. Changes will take effect immediately.

If you’re already a member, visit the Upgrade Plan page to choose a new plan and see your prorated price at checkout. Upgrading will always start a new annual period, but you will receive a credit for unused time on your current subscription.

Please note the “Total Due Today” and “First Renewal” on the checkout screen to understand what and when you will pay.

Memberships provide access to our platform to quickly find and download individual assets as needed for projects. They aren’t intended for the member to have entire albums or libraries downloaded to their hard drive.

You’re certainly welcome to download as many individual assets as you genuinely need for your current projects, but to prevent abuse, our system may notify you if it detects excessive downloading. Most members rarely run into this as they usually only download a handful of files on any given day.

Projects completed while a member are licensed forever, but the assets you download aren’t. Since the assets downloaded during membership are only licensed for use while a member, it wouldn’t be feasible to deliver entire libraries to members as they would have hundreds/thousands of unlicensed files floating around on their computers if they chose to cancel their membership.

If you choose to cancel, your membership will remain active until the end of your current subscription period.

Once your subscription ends, you will no longer have permission to use any assets you’ve downloaded in new projects.

Don’t worry, any projects you already published while your membership was active are covered forever and you will not retroactively receive copyright claims.

Membership fees are not refundable.

You can create a free account and download a watermarked preview of any music track and add assets to project playlists.

These “temp tracks” are great for seeing if a track is a good fit for your project or client. Simply activate a membership when you’re ready to officially use a track.

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