How to Handle Post-Production Releases

Video Transcript

"TRAVIS JOHNS: Hi. I'm Travis Johns with Expert Village, and I'm going to be talking to you about releases. Obviously, if you're shooting out in the field and someone other than the talent comes into the frame, you're going to have to getting a release to use their likeness for whatever the project ends up being viewed on. If it's going to be on the internet or television, a standard release form will probably be provided to you from the client. If not, there's tons of places on the internet that you can grab these. The main thing to remember is if you have to get releases, you need to make sure that you take care of that beforehand and you know that going into a shoot. Obviously, if you have footage and you don't have releases from everyone in it, that footage may become unusable and you need to make sure that the client knows that upfront so you're not stuck with unusable footage that the client still wants to use. Another time that releases are going to come into play is that if you're using someone else's footage. You need to make sure that you have all of the rights for that. Obviously, if you're using any sort of music or backing track for your video, you need to make sure that you have the rights to use that as well. You don't want to create an entire video, go through an entire project only to use some sort of copyrighted music, image, et cetera, and then get in trouble for it later on. It's also very important to establish upfront with the client what kinds of releases you're going to be needing throughout the duration of the project because you want to make sure that it's their responsibility and not yours. You need to create the project whether it's cutting the video together, creating graphics for it, creating still images for it but you really don't need to be burdening yourself with dealing with all the legal ramifications that could come up throughout the process."