Film
Filmmaking, whether it’s short films, documentaries, or feature length motion pictures, involves a broad spectrum of legal issues including copyright, trademark, licensing, product placement, merchandising, actor agreements, crew agreements, location releases, music rights, insurance, and so much more. Legal clearances, contracts, and protections are a crucial factor in the creation of any film and getting an experienced legal team involved early on can make sure your film doesn’t stall when it comes time to get insurance, distribute, or market and release your film.
What Can a Lawyer do For You?
As lawyers specializing in the legal issues that arise in the creation, marketing, and distribution of a film, we help our clients with contracts, clearance, copyrights, trademarks, licensing, and everything else necessary to make and release a film. This includes drafting, negotiating, and reviewing all sorts of contracts like actor agreements, work for hire agreements, crew agreements, location/property releases, music and synch licenses, composer/score agreements, and insurance. It includes protecting the copyright of the film and trademark protection of names and logos. It means maximizing our clients’ rights and revenue. And it means answering questions about the ins and outs of making a successful film. Essentially, we are here to handle the business and legal stuff so you can make a great film! Please reach out to us at Creative Law Network if you have any questions. We’re here to help!
Legal Checklist:
Film captures great tales, epic narratives, and documentary information and stories that can change our perspective of the world around us. Making a film means addressing a lot of moving parts and hurdles. Doing everything in order and correctly is crucial to making a successful film and avoiding roadblocks down the line. We’ve put together this basic checklist for filmmakers. This list isn’t exhaustive or in any particular order, and not every item is relevant to every project. It can be a guide to help build a proper legal plan and team for your film.
Determine whether your film uses SAG (Screen Actors Guild) actors or falls under any of the SAG-AFTRA guidelines. SAG-AFTRA has a lot of specific rules that could impact your production.
Obtaining rights to the subject matter is a crucial early step. If your film is based on a book or life story or script written by someone else, you’ll need to a contract for the rights to make that material into a film.
Third party materials included in the film (e.g. footage, music, still photos, and artwork) must be cleared. In other words, the material must be licensed if it’s going to appear in the film.
Keeping detailed lists of all third party materials, along with the sources, timestamps in the film, and how it is used, is crucial to properly clearing all uses in the film.
Registering the copyrights in your film is a really important step! (Look here for more about copyrights.)
Working on a film usually requires a crew. Crew Agreements and Work for Hire Agreements are important tools to dictate the responsibilities of these crew members, and to retain full ownership in the copyright of your film.
If you’re filming in buildings or locations not owned by you, location releases and/or permits are important to ensure you have the rights to be present in that location and capture that location on film.
Working with actors, models, or extras requires having proper releases and documentation from everyone on screen. This is especially important if you are filming minors, as you’ll need a parent or guardian to sign as well.
Including music in a film means having all the necessary rights from all the right parties. Clearing music rights can take a long time and be very complex!
Insurance is important protection for films and filmmakers. Advice of a lawyer is required when applying for errors and omissions (E&O) insurance for a film. Start working with a lawyer early in the process so that lawyer can help with the E&O insurance.
Forming a company (like a limited liability company (LLC) or corporation) is a useful tool to consolidate all of the intellectual property in your film and protect you from personal liability. (Look here for more about business formation.)
CONTRACTS! While contracts may not be fun, they lay out the necessary terms for any deal. Getting solid contracts in place is crucial and can help avoid legal problems in the future. Every person working on a film should sign a contract. Films can require a lot of different contracts, but working with a solid legal team helps make a great and successful film!
If you need any help with anything listed above, please reach out to us at Creative Law Network!