Being on the mailing list of a few success “gurus”, I get a lot of sales pitches for overpriced motivational tools. The “tool” of the year (2008) is overpriced vision boards or vision movies. These tools allow you to create books or movies that have inspirational pictures, words, and even music that are supposed to implant your deepest desires into your subconscious so that you will achieve it automatically.

It is my hope that you have not bought any of those products, and if you have, please ask for your money back because you can create the same videos FOR FREE!

I am sure that Mac users have a similar tool available, but Windows users can download for free from Microsoft a copy of the Microsoft Photo Story program.

This program allows you to put your inspirational photos into a slide show, add motivational captions, and then put music and narration into your motivational vision movie.

Not only is this program free, but it is easier to use than a lot of the ones that are being sold by the “gurus.”

The instructions to make your first story can be found here.

Now some of these sites might offer “free” photos and music to get you started. If you do not have images you can use, then check out the following sites for some truly free photos that you can use for non-commercial purposes:

http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
http://www.sxc.hu/

You also might want to search Flickr.com. As long as you are not using the photos for commercial purposes, you can find millions of creative commons tagged photos that you can use in your movies. Check out the Creative Commons section of Flickr to see the photos you can use.

That covers the tool to make your vision movie and the photos. What about the sites offering motivational music in your movies?

Creative Commons to the rescue!

C-Net runs the music site: http://music.download.com/ where you can find over 100,000 mp3s FOR FREE! If you are looking for music similar to the tracks you will find in pay sites, then check out the New Age section.

So are you going to go out and drop money on some guru’s success movie maker, when you can get your own…FOR FREE?

To inspire you to action, here is a vision video I have created using the sites and tools listed above:

There is one last step that will give you all the functionality of the “guru’s” tools, the ability to put your video on a portable device (iPod, PSP, etc>).

Download the full version of the open source MediaCoder:

Install, open, and use the extension button to easily convert all your vision videos into formats your portable devices can read.

Please let me know if you find this useful and share your videos on YouTube to let others know how easy free can be.

Have fun making your vision videos,
Chris Elliott