Summer has finally arrived, and with those longer days comes a sense of excitement and adventure. If you’re a video creator, the summer season is a chance to bring bright colors, bold typefaces, and a general sense of fun to your video projects.
Motion Array’s catalog has everything you need to bring the summer vibes to your videos. In this article, we’ll be highlighting some of the best music, SFX, templates, motion graphics, LUTs, and stock footage to give your videos that carefree, magic summertime feeling.
Royalty-free music
Music is an important storytelling tool, as it sets the mood and contributes to the pacing of the edit. Music that channels the energy of summer tends to be up-tempo with a danceable rhythm. Lyrics are positive, and choruses invite audiences to sing along. These are songs that bring people together to groove.
We love this classic Dick Dale style surf rock track. It would be a great fit for a travel video, a commercial project or a film trailer.
Footprints in the Sand has more of a tropical, Latin feel. The bouncy beat would work well with fashion videos, party recaps, or best-of-summer round ups.
Double Rainbow chills things out a bit with its mixture of classic pop and R&B. It has a warm feeling and a slightly slower tempo, which makes it a versatile choice for all types of summertime videos.
Download more summertime sounds through Motion Array’s curated playlist to get started.
Summer SFX
Adding a few key sound effects to the audio mix can be helpful, too. Including SFX in your project is good for enhancing the natural sounds of a scene and give your viewers a sense of place.
Cicadas and crickets are a familiar nighttime summertime sound. This SFX would be useful to include with footage shot late at night in a natural setting — a great way to add ambiance to a scene shot around a campfire perhaps.
The ambient noise of a public pool can be great for footage shot during the day. Try layering SFX like this under dialogue in a short film or a VO track in a lifestyle video.
Summer templates
Templates are a quick and easy way to bring a seasonal style to your video projects. Motion Array’s catalog features downloadable templates for After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and more. A pre-built template allows creators to be more efficient — you aren’t staring at an empty timeline when you open your project — you can simply input info and customize the styles to your heart’s desire.
Templates are a particularly great way to build eye-catching title slides for a video project. They are also an excellent tool for promoting special one-off summertime events.
This playful ice cream typeface After Effects template really brings the lighthearted vibes of summer. The ice cream comes in 7 different flavors and has 10 different background colors, making it easy to customize to fit your particular project. This template would be great to use for an opening text slide.
The En Route template could be used to create an intro for a travel video or as an event recap reel. This template includes media placeholders, text placeholders, a logo placeholder, and controls over color and tint effects. To get started, you simply need to drag and drop your footage and text into the After Effects timeline.
The Spectrum of Soulful Strokes template includes stylized titles and transitions. Using something like this is a nice option if you’re looking to add some pops of summertime vibes to your video project.
Motion graphics
Summer is all about fun. Adding some animated motion graphic effects to your project is sure to boost the charming and playful vibes.
These animated beach-themed creatures are adorable. This motion graphics pack features 31 hand-drawn elements like flying gulls, dancing crabs, and peaceful clouds. The colored-pencil style drawings will add a cute element to your project without crossing into cheesy territory. We recommend using them to add emphasis to your videos.
Motion graphics aren’t just for adding cute illustrative elements. This Liquid VFX pack features 12 different liquid splashes to bring energy, movement, and the feeling of summery sweat to your video. The splashes are built on a transparent background, which makes them easy to use as transitions between clips or as an overlay on your footage.
LUTs
LUTs are a video creator’s secret weapon when it comes to elevating the look and feel of your footage and changing the vibe. They’re also helpful in matching footage shot on two different cameras.
For a summery feel, we recommend LUTs with vibrant tones for footage shot at golden hour, soft teal hues for anything that includes water, or vintage film effects if you want to add a nostalgic element. LUTs work well for all types of video projects and will add an extra polish to your final project.
The Summer Vibe LUTs pack has something to fit the energy for all of your summertime footage. This pack features 15 different LUTs so you can quickly add warm or cool tones depending on the look you are going for. This LUT pack is compatible with all programs, so once it’s downloaded, you simply need to add it to your editing program, and you will be ready to start color grading your footage.
If you are specifically looking for warm-toned LUTs check out the Sunset LUTs pack. This includes 6 LUTs specifically designed to make your footage appear like it was shot during golden hour. It will deepen your shadows and make your highlights sparkle.
Looking for something a bit more subtle? Check out this pack of 11 Booster LUTs if you want to elevate certain aspects of your video footage for a more understated summer vibe.
Summer stock footage
What summertime looks like depends a lot on your location. For coastal city-dwellers, it means packed beaches, busy boardwalks, and raucous block parties. If you are in a more remote area, it could be blooming flowers and lazy days relaxing next to sparkling lakes. Summertime can evoke visions of palm trees, beach days, backyard BBQs, or a simple day at the neighborhood pool.
You don’t have to travel to a faraway destination to bring a summery vibe to your video project, though. Stock footage makes it so you can create something that channels the feeling of summer without even having to leave the house.
This aerial footage of a beach crowded with red umbrellas is busy, but not chaotic. Mixing stock footage like this into a project is a great way to stretch the budget of a short film or music video project — this would be great to pair with footage where characters are also wearing a shade of red. Stock footage can also be helpful in establishing a place in an opening sequence.
This shot of air bubbles in a cold glass makes our mouth water. A stock shot like this is generic enough to work in anything where you want to add a summery vibe. We can imagine it being a cut-in for a social media reel, a music video, or a lifestyle video.
Stock footage is a great way to create cutaways, use as b-roll, and add context. If a human face is included in the frame, it’s helpful if it’s obscured in some way, so it doesn’t introduce any continuity issues to your final project.
This stock footage of three friends hanging out at the pool is a great example. It would work well as an opening sequence shot or an extra detail for a story that happens at a public pool. If you are using a combination of stock footage and original footage, adding LUTs can help tie the elements together in the final edit.
AI voiceover
Voiceover can bring everything together and strengthen the storytelling style. It’s also key to helping viewers remember your project.
Motion Array’s AI voiceover tool lets you customize voiceover by accent and can translate into other languages, giving your videos a more global appeal. The tools also allow you to adjust tone, pacing, and inflection.
When adding a voiceover track be mindful that the voice matches the mood that you’ve set with the music, the color grading, and the visuals. For a summery vibe, we recommend sticking with a friendly and warm voiceover, just like a perfect summer day. It should feel like catching up with an old friend, rather than being talked to by an authority figure.
The voiceover catalogue is searchable by accent, speed, and emotion, which will help you dial in exactly the right vibe for your summer video projects.
Let’s make this the best summer ever
Summer doesn’t stick around for a long time, but you can keep the carefree vibe of summer alive year-round with Motion Array’s catalog of creative assets.
Adding creative assets like royalty-free music, templates, motion graphics, LUTs, and AI voiceover to your project will make it stand out and keep people’s eyeballs on it.
Let’s make this a summer to remember. We can’t wait to see what you create.
