{"id":2763,"date":"2020-07-02T10:47:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-02T17:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ww3.ambientskies.com\/legal-paper-trails-for-video-production-what-do-i-need\/"},"modified":"2023-02-24T12:44:40","modified_gmt":"2023-02-24T19:44:40","slug":"legal-paper-trails-for-video-production-what-do-i-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ambientskies.com\/blog\/filmmaking\/legal-paper-trails-for-video-production-what-do-i-need\/","title":{"rendered":"Legal Paper Trails For Video Production: What Do I Need?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Remember those guerrilla days? Where you’d throw all caution to the wind to grab that shot before education taught you otherwise. Even if you haven’t gone through that phase, learning the hard way that you need to protect yourself on paper can be an infuriating and sometimes costly experience. Many of us have been burned by a hand-shake agreement or been caught somewhere without proper credentials. It’s not best practice and it’s not a professional approach.<\/p>\n
If you’re looking to successfully execute a production, you’ll need to acquire a long legal paper trail along the way. If you want to guarantee that everyone gets paid, if you want to avoid a tax audit, if you want to avoid getting sued, if you want to sell a product, and if you want to avoid going to jail in some severe cases — You need to cover your ass legally!<\/p>\n
Let’s take a basic look at production without going too deep into the world of legalities associated with video production. Because film production development with the intention of releasing a profitable media product deals with much more legal jargon that we’re not going to cover here.<\/p>\n
Let’s get into it!<\/p>\n
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After a Producer and an Investor of a production have signed the necessary agreements to establish authority, use of the budget, intellectual property, and expectations (which is a whole other blog), the producer then puts together a team to execute the production. What will happen then is, the producer will either start an LLC or find an existing ProCo that acts as the incubator entity that coordinates and shoots the production. <\/p>\n
When this happens, the production is ready for the next phase. To accomplish this next phase, you’ll need to cover your tracks and you’re likely to need the following legal documents…<\/p>\n
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First things first — You need to talk about the budget. You can’t coordinate or plan one thing without knowing where you stand financially. The Producer will throw out a ballpark number that is vague and the ProCo will gather all info about the vision — script, outlines, whatever what have you. The ProCo will then assess, draw up a plan of attack and put together a precise budget with a hard total. Typically the budget is contained within a ‘pitch deck’ or proposal that also includes a synopsis, story\/mood boards, etc. The Producer will receive it, they’ll jostle back and forth until they reach an agreement. <\/p>\n