Contracts, Releases, & Other Legal Issues in Indie Filmmaking

Series Summary

Film making is the process by which a film is made. The different stages of filmmaking include development, pre-production, production, post-production and distribution. A low budget film is a film that is cheaply produced by unrecognized directors who can not afford the costly sets, costumes, and actors (among other logistics of film making) that feature films can afford. Low budget film actors and technicians are not often paid and operate for the artistic idea.

In this series of instructional video clips, you’ll learn more about low-budget or Independent film making. The first step to making an Indie film is to get over the contracts, releases and other legal issues dealing with scripts and copyrights. Once you’ve taken the appropriate measures and ensured the legality of your film, you will need to find or produce enough money to make your film. This is an important step in setting your budget for equipment, crews, and actors. Learn how to hold auditions, work the camera and other technical instruments, direct and edit your film. These informative expert video clips will aid you in your independent filmmaking quest!

Video Transcript

"Hello I’m Corey Turner here on ExpertVillage.com and today we’re talking about low budget moving making. Now within the past twenty-four months I’ve written, produced and directed two independent films and I’ve also just wrapped and just finished completely a children’s DVD. As I go into every production and especially as I come out of every production, I’ve learned so many more things and today I hope to pass that information and knowledge on to you. So you’ve decided that you want to make a low budget movie, but you don’t know where to start. Step number one, this is one of the most important things for me, go to your library, your bookstore, search on the internet and find a book that talks about movie contracts. Now if you’re a movie maker and you want to be creative and you’re ready to start filming, usually you try to rush pass this part of the process, but it is vital. And as we talk on each step of the way, we’re always going to revert back to the legal issues and so it’s a good foundation to have that right from the start. Now legal contracts, the things you really want to focus on are your actor releases, your location releases, you also want to talk about equipment and music, music is a vital thing. So you want to have the releases so that you have control of that and also you want to make sure that the script, whether it be yours or somebody else’s, you’ve addressed from the very beginning how to handle that and you have the contracts in place to do that. "